How do you make sure your blog ranks well enough in search results to be found by plenty of people? Search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. It is hard to keep up, but most of us have to make the effort. It simply is too expensive for many of us to hire a really good SEO expert—and the bad ones are worse than useless.

Besides, knowing how to judge an SEO expert often requires knowing so much about SEO that you might as well do it yourself. If you know what you are doing, you can hire others to some of the work for you. But how do you know where to find them?

SEOClerks is a site where SEO workers of various kinds offer their services. The prices range from just $3 on up to about $1000, depending on the complexity or difficulty of the task and the skill of the service provider. Some of the SEO workers on the site offer subscriptions or give discounts for multiple orders.

This is a great site for buying SEO services. You can try out workers by purchasing small, cheap tasks and see how they do at those before signing up for more expensive packages of services. There is no need to risk much time or money finding out how well the services work for you.

If you use social media sites to get visitors to your blogs, you can, for example, Buy Tweets. You pay a small fee to get someone to tweet your sponsored messages to their Twitter list. Then you can easily see if the tweets resulted in traffic to your blog. If you sell goods or services on your blog, you can quickly see if the traffic resulted in actual purchases.

If you have a FaceBook fan page, you can, for example, have someone get 200 people to Like your page for only $5. From there you can send them to your blog. Pretty much any SEO work you could imagine is available for a reasonable price—or downright cheap.

For a few dollars, you can have an SEO-enhanced article written, get your blog listed on dozens of directory sites, or have comments posted on high-ranking blogs that link back to your blog. You can even buy links on specific blogs to permanently link back to yours.

But PageRank (PR) is still used by many advertisers to select blogs to advertise on. That makes PR important for monetizing your blog.

A free service called PRChecker lets you quickly check PageRank for a web site and then generate code that you can paste into a widget (or any html code) to display a button that shows the current (updated) PR of each page of your site, on your site.

The PageRank button comes in three sizes. Here is the size I normally use:

There is also a free PageRank Checker Tool that you can add to your site. I’ve put one in the right-hand sidebar of this page for you to use to check PR of your sites right here at BlogDesignJournal.

So you can come back here anytime to check PR of a blog and read about what’s going on in the blog design world.

In particular Twitter is being touted as a site that can supply all your business needs concerning marketing and traffic generation.

Does this mean blogging sites are now endangered in terms of their ‘leading’ role in web 2.0 online marketing? Actually this would hardly seem the case and here are 5 very strong reasons why.

Self-Hosted Blogs

Most blogs are self hosted meaning you own the site and the content and are therefore in total control. Online social sites have rule and regulations set forth by the site administrator governing behavior.

The ability to ‘personalize’ your space on a social network site is non-existent therefore ‘branding’ yourself is very difficult. You can not build a solid foundation to an online business on a site where you have no control.

Blogs Gain Authority

Comments or content you share at a social site are not displayed for very long thereby they will have no long lasting affect. On a blogging site every post, comment or useful information is always available for viewing and tends to build up the authority of the site itself.

The more content posted the more authority the blog will gain. This is a great foundation for building credibility and a business.

Symbol of Commitment

A blog is a symbol of commitment since it takes effort to maintain the site. Commitment is exactly what people look for in businesses since it is a sign of reliability. This leads to an increase in trust which is a vital asset to have when marketing on the internet. Online social sites require only that you ‘show up’ and chat a little thereby demonstrating very little effort or commitment.

The Strength is in the Link

Socialization communities normally link to blogs as opposed to the other way around. That kind of says it all right there since it seems these communities need to ‘defer’ to blogs as a source of reliable and useful content. This does not bode well however for the credibility of social network sites!

Analytics

Blogging sites have analytic capabilities allowing then to function more fully as a business platforms. These capabilities allow the site to improve and grow and are a necessary tool for anyone serious about building a lasting business.

Business blogs have become the adopted standard for online marketers due to their flexibility, ease of use and ability to interact with customers. Recent trends however indicate an increasing acceptance/reliance upon using certain online social sites such as Twitter as free standing marketing platforms.

These social communities offer the same attraction that blogging sites do in terms of interaction and ease of use but comparisons stop there. The ability of social sites to help people ‘build’ a business when marketing on the internet is in question.

The 5 reasons mentioned above as to why blogging sites are not likely to fall from favor as online marketing platforms merely fortifies their dominance. While many social network platforms such as Twitter are great traffic sources they do not offer a solid platform upon which to build a long lasting business.

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About the Author:
TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina. To learn more about the effectiveness of business blogs as marketing platforms and to also receive a free instructional manual that teaches valuable niche research techniques simply visit:http://blogbrawn.com/
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But there is a problem.

That keyword that you targetted is simply not delivering the traffic you expected and your site is not generating the visitors or income you expected.This happens a lot and is one of the drawbacks of micro niche blogs..sometimes the keyword numbers that you have based your site around simply don’t deliver the traffic that you expected from the numbers in the Google keyword tool.

This is why putting all your eggs in one basket is a problematic strategy and why you will want to transition this site to an authority site with lots of content.This type of site is not dependent on one keyword;rather it is capable of ranking for many different keywords and consequently will provide better returns in the long run.

The key to success with blogs or websites is keyword research and it is easier to rank,initially anyway,for a whole range of less competitive keywords than one hotly targetted phrase or word.

Your keyword research should target long tail keywords initially because you will gain momentum almost immediately and the way to do this is through proper keyword research. To do this you need to generate a large list of keywords and for each and every post on your site you should be targetting at least three keywords, not one.If you repeat this process stringently for every piece of content you have tripled the chances of ranking and winning traffic for each piece of content on your site.

And you will exponentially increase the potential traffic numbers rather than the disappointing situation of ranking really well for one keyword and then discovering that it really was not worth it.

Your keyword research needs to involve more than a cursory glance at the Google keyword tool and a check that the exact match domain is available. A product like Wordtracker will do the trick because it will generate huge lists of keywords and not just exact keywords but related keywords too.

This is vital to the proper setting up of your site with a widely spread range of long tailed keywords which will see you increasing your traffic exponentially.Related keywords are critical to your keyword research and any piece of content about, for example, education should also include keywords like “schooling”, “college”,”education grants” etc.

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About the Author:
Check out the EZGO golf cart and ezgo golf cart accessories at http://ezgogolfcartaccessories.com
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A blog of domestic implements from a few features, allow search engines to crawl the content very quickly. The result was the fastest I have ever witnessed, added a new post within 20 seconds (including the top 10 ranking) for relevant phrases. How can this come about?

BlogPing

BlogPing is a protocol that implements any popular blog system. It serves primarily two things:

1. Blogs to notify each other (They were linked)

2. Notify search engines (Google Hello, I have published a new page)

Especially with the integration of Google Sitemaps that go on WordPress with a click of the hand, you need a search engine’s new content page to look once more. Sitemap opens directly to crawl a new page.

High degree of optimization of the source code

In WordPress usually retains very accurate web standards. A title is reported only as such. The same is true with other HTML tags. The quality of the templates is such, that the code can almost always run easily to W3 validation process. This also simplifies the search engines crawling a site.

A clean URL structure

WordPress provides the possibility of a rational use of URL structure. This is also helpful.

Performance

In conclusion, you don’t have to worry about the performance website. Because WordPress is indeed far from being resource-saving, it also provides a plugin called wp-super-cache.

Good internal linking

A blog encourages even the structural reasons to link an already written word. This is partially automatically handled by features such as tag clouds and the category classification of the contributions.

Latest content

Many blogs are designed to publish updated information. This is also one of the reasons for the short-term transport in the top ten. It is because blogs often contain the latest information about a topic. This also fits with the current real-time strategy Google uses. One carried a no-name content that is thought to be of high quality and watched the development of the link as the residence times, etc.

Another point concerning the timeliness is: A blog is posting updates itself. This is done firstly through features such as tag clouds or looking for constant movement on the sides. Another way is by comments that are received every now and then.

Blog instead of conventional web pages?

I am always wondering if it is best to ask a blog instead of a static Web site. The answer is clear: Why not? WordPress is ultimately nothing more than a content management system. Of course, it can create quite conventional looking pages. One thing is certain: Blog contents are not mainly preferred, because they are thought to be blog content. They are preferred because WordPress is so well optimized, and can be optimized by plug-ins.

Find the best premium WordPress themes for your WordPress powered blogs from the large collection of themes at ThemesAndMods.com

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/advantages-of-blogging-wordpress-blogging-1683945.html

Image via Wikipedia

by Kathleen Gresham

When you say WordPress, people automatically think of blogging. WordPress is the blog engine supreme. It is free, easy to install and easy to customize.

Thinking of WordPress as just a blog engine, though, seriously limits your options. That would be a shame, because WordPress offers so many options.

WordPress is a full-featured content management system (CMS). It can keep track of multiple authors and their privileges, provide a place to store documents and allow users to download them, keep track of document revisions and allow you to compare them and reinstate earlier versions—and so much more.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with WordPress. And most options are freely downloadable somewhere on line at no charge.

1. Web Sites

WordPress allows you to build a static web site much faster than any website builder software. Especially if you are not a wizard with that particular sitebuilder. That is, unless you are a super whiz with, say, DreamWeaver, you probably cannot match the speed—and certainly not the ease—with which you can set up a web site with WordPress.

Nowadays there are some great themes with dropdown menus that look like high-quality web site templates and can be easily customized.

Not only that, the search engine optimization benefits of a WordPress site versus a conventional HTML web site are tremendous. There are so many blog networks and SEO plugins and other tools that you can use to promote a WordPress site that are simply not available for HTML web sites.

2. Forums

There are several free plugins that allow you to easily set up a discussion forum, using WordPress. You can use that forum to make money from advertising, offer support for the products or services sold by your company (on line or off line), meet like-minded people, and so much more.

3. Membership Sites

Membership sites are a great way to make residual income. You can charge a fee for joining, for example for a niche membership site, and/or charge a monthly membership fee. Internet marketers often use a membership site to post their products for purchasers to download, to offer affiliate marketing tools and status reports to their affiliates, and to offer support for their products.

Others simply charge a membership fee for members to get access to a host of free downloadable ebooks, software, or other original content in a particular niche.

4. Article Directories and Link Directories

Article marketing is a staple of online marketing, and articles sites have many purposes. If your article site becomes popular, you can make good advertising revenue. If not, you still have a good place to post original or PLR articles with links to your main blog or web site.

You can download free themes and plugins to build an article directory with WordPress. Or  you can build yourself a link directory with other free WordPress themes and/or plugins. You could, for example, add a links page from your main blog to all your other sites.

5. Blogs

Yes, of course, WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible blog engine for self-hosted blogs. The very popularity of WordPress means there are thousands of theme designers and plugin makers constantly providing excellent new free or paid products to add value to WordPress blogs.

6. Combination Sites

Lately I have been making combination website-blogs for offline and online businesses. That is easy to do with WordPress.

For example, see the site designed for Temples Gate, a charming metaphysical gift shop in Houston, Texas. The old site was unfindable on Google for any related keyword or phrase.

The new WordPress-based site rose to Google PR2 in just a few months. It gets traffic via Google searches from all over world.

The site continues to grow as we add more pages, posts, and photos. Google loves sites that steadily grow. And site visitors like to see new and different photos and text whenever they visit the site.

The embedded blog fits seamlessly into the web site, and the site is linked to a Google Calendar so that the store owner can easily add and update the classes, workshops, and other events held at the store.

We will soon add a shopping cart to encourage online purchases. WordPress makes it easy to do that, and several of shopping cart plugins are free. We are still comparing features and usability on a separate test site.

Flexibility and Free Tutorials

Some of the same features can be found on Joomla and Drupal, but nothing beats WordPress for design flexibility and the huge array of plugins, widgets and other accessories available to easily customize it. Also, there is so much free training available for WordPress. WordPress video courses abound, and many of them are free.

So think outside the box when deciding how to build your next site, whether for personal use, to enhance your offline business or for ecommerce. Consider using WordPress even if you are not building a blog. Your imagination is just about the only limit to what you can do with it.

Adding Extra Value to Your Blog

And consider all the options that the WordPress community offers for adding value to your blog. Even if a blog is your main goal, WordPress allows you to add a forum for your reader community or a paid membership area.

If you want to do business on line, WordPress is a great tool for that, too. The sky is just about the limit when it comes to WordPress.

Select Your Hosting Service Carefully

If you intend to build a business in online retail sales, however, make sure you have a good ecommerce web hosting service. Make sure  you use a service that fully supports whatever it is that you are trying to do.

My first hosting was horrible. We could not even get a simple WordPress blog to work properly on their service, and it was a nightmare. So look for quality, not just price, in selecting a hosting service, even if you are not currently planning to get into ecommerce.

What cool things do you do with WordPress? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Kathleen Gresham designs, writes, and promotes blogs and websites and consults on search engine optimization (SEO) and directory listings for online and off line businesses in Houston, TX. For more information, see Houston Blog Web and Web Fresh Leads.

Blog Carnivals help bloggers recognize each other’s efforts, organize important topics, and promote conversation on the blogosphere. They also help solve that isolation problem by creating meta posts that contain links to lots of other bloggers’ posts, thus providing them with much-needed exposure.

Carnivals help you make money on the internet although there are many ways that blog owners can make money online, especially when they are solely focusing on their own site. The carnivals help in creation of this requisite value and at the same time increases traffic to the website.

Blog Carnivals are basically roundups of blog posts hosted at a different blog each week and are something that has slowly become popular amongst those in the blogging world because it is both beneficial to the blogger and the host of the Carnival.

The Carnivals have become a great help to the blogging community and are great resources for readers and can really help you ATTRACT some new readers.

It is one of the easiest ways you can utilize your own content to drive traffic to your blog, increase your back links and make more money blogging. Carnivals are collections of blog posts submitted by bloggers to one designated blog.

Blog Carnivals have recently become even more popular amongst bloggers in the blogging world because they are wonderful resources for readers and they can find a lot of new sites in one spot.

The definition of a Blog Carnival is when somebody takes a given blog post or topic and compiles all posts they find about that topic into one post called a Carnival.

This is not only one of the fastest and least difficult ways to get indexed in Google, Yahoo & MSN but it is also a massive source of income that is just waiting for you to pick up your share.

Blogs have evolved from merely being social outlets in cyberspace into profitable channels which could provide for the user several income streams to supplement his current earnings, or perhaps even surpass the same.

Bloggers are hard at work all over the blogosphere, creating their posts, but what fun is it to write if no one ever comes by to read what you’ve written.

Hence, blog Carnivals help solve that isolation problem by creating meta posts that contain links to lots of other bloggers’ posts, thus providing them with much-needed exposure.

Blog posts are the life line of the web site and their quality alone will determine if online visitors read and enjoy what you have to offer or if they will be disappointed in what you have provided to them and never come back again.

Therefore, blog sites must have a unique design in order to compete with the other blogs that exist in the online world. Blogware is becoming a standard content management system these days while blogs are increasingly becoming a useful tool to communicate with online viewers.

Blog marketing is the latest innovative marketing strategy on the internet and is a big tool when it comes to advertising and communicating with internet users. In and of itself blogging is an efficient connecting and interacting tool, which makes extensive use of different internet attributes.

Making money on the internet is not an easy task, and requires that you do many things in order to be competitive with other blog owners while sustaining continued growth throughout the future.

Those who participate in Carnivals and hold their own blog Carnivals attain huge success as this marketing venue provides a way for you to market your blog extremely well.

Sharyce Arciaga is the Author of this Article and has an extensive 20 year back ground in the area of sales and marketing and can show you how to use blog sites to increase traffic to your blog with the Blog Carnival Submitter.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/how-blog-carnivals-help-bloggers-834715.html

And you can get this widget and put it on a blog about, say, graphics, for the use of site visitors. Putting a text generator on your site may bring visitors back for repeat visits.

At WidgetBox.com you can generate the widget for a wide variety of platforms (including WordPress, Blogger, HTML, and lots more). And you have the choice of javascript or flash.

To get the neon-text-generation widget, just click on the tab at the bottom of the widget in the sidebar on the right on this page. (You may need to scroll down or up to find the widget.)

I love neon! I hope you do, too.

You can optimize your blog, and you can write and place articles, post on forums (with your blog address in your signature), send out press releases, get links from blog directories, and so on.

But one often overlooked way to make your blog more appealing to search engines is to have a dedicated IP address, especially if you hope to improve your Google page rank by linking from one of your blog or web sites to another.

Of course, you can go out and get different web hosting services for your different sites. But that gets expensive and causes administrative headaches. Or you can get a dedicated server (ditto), but you still have just one IP address (for example 12.345.67.8). So it pretty obvious to the search engines if you link from one blog or web site to another on that same server.

Dedicated servers are generally expensive and you have to administer them yourself, including constantly upgrading the security to keep out hackers. Are you prepared to do that? I’m not. 

Another concern if you do not have a dedicated server is that you do not control, or even know, what kinds of other sites share your server. Your sites could be banned by various email providers, vendors, or advertising services (like Google and Yahoo) if the IP address of your shared server gets blocked because of what some other webmaster is doing.

The cheapest answer I have found is to use a web hosting service that gives you several dedicated IP addresses to use for your most important sites. From there, you can link to your other sites on a shared server. This won’t stop all problems. It is possible that your whole block of IP addresses could get blocked for some reason. But if you choose your host wisely, that should not be a problem. 

Hint; Read their terms of service. If they refuse to host porn and gambling sites, you are much safer from being blocked.

I have just started using a new hosting service. I wanted dedicated IP addresses and did not want the hassle of managing my own server. So far, I am very pleased. To me their WebSphere control panel is much better designed than Cpanel, and the telephone support is excellent. 

Note: If you are a beginner and are totally dependent on Cpanel videos to learn how to use a hosting service, you may want to wait till you have more experience. On the other hand WebSphere is so easy to use, that you may do better to start out there. YMMV.

So here is my recommendation: IX Web Hosting. I will let you know how it works out, but for now I’m happy.

So Eric Giguere has posted a challenge on his blog: Write a page a day for every day in February. And he’ll give you a copy of his $97 best-selling book on how to make money with Google Adsense if you complete the challenge.

You can’t lose with this challenge. No matter what happens, you get a lot of work done that you need to do anyway. And if you complete the challenge, you get a very nice reward.

All you have to do is post a comment with the URL for each day’s post to Eric’s blog for that day. Doing that gives you a free backlink to your blog, which is great for search engine optimization (SEO).

[To clarify, you just make 29 posts in February. For each of your posts, you put a comment with a link to it in one of Eric's posts. Your dates don't have to match up exactly.]

By the end of February, you will have 29 free backlinks from a very popular blog, which helps your Google PageRank. (And his blog readers will see your links and maybe click on them, which could bring you more traffic and word of mouth.)

Plus, one lucky blogger will win a copy of Eric’s super-duper software, PLRSiteBuilder, which automates the creation of web sites built to make money with Adsense ads. How cool is that?

You can sign up till February 8, and you have till March 10 to post the comments with links to your daily pages. Why not give it a try? See Eric’s blog, MEMWG, The Unofficial AdSense Blog, to sign up.

If you don’t want to take the challenge, I recommend reading Eric’s blog anyway, because it’s an excellent blog on how to make money with your blog—and that’s a good thing, too.