So you have set up your micro niche blog with an exact match domain for maximum Google love and have been lucky enough to get onto the first page of Google..or have worked really hard to get it onto the first two pages.

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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Image by Andrew Wilkinson via Flickr

Sometimes its nice to know who’s been visiting your blog and where they came from, rather than just a numbers game – “i had so many visitors last week” etc. Making good use of visitor statistics can help you fine-tune copy and content if you’re a serious online marketeer.

And if you’re not, then there’s still nothing more satisfying than seeing daily visitor numbers rise week on week. If nothing else, it proves you’re doing something right.

Blogger and WordPress blog platforms make it really easy to quickly add stat programs like Google Analytics and StatCounter through their Admin User Panels. In Blogger‘s case, you simply need to add a html/javascript gadget and copy and paste the StatCounter tracking code into it. It really is that simple.

However, when I came to add StatCounter stats to my Tumblr account, I found it rather more challenging.

Tumblr is described as “a blogging platform that allows users to post text, images, video, links, quotes, and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users are able to “follow” other users and see their posts together on their dashboard.

\You can like or reblog other blogs on the site and other users can do the same to your posts. The service emphasizes customizability and ease of use” (see wikipedia)

I’ve been using to collate a fantasy iPod playlist, posting a different music track or video from YouTube each day. I now have a steady stream of fellow music lovers following my posts.

I couldn’t find anything in the help pages and most online searches drew a blank.

Then I found, almost by accident, the nugget of information I needed: how to install javascript into your Tumblr template, and so I’d like to share that information with you here.

As with all template changes, please, please make sure you’ve got a back up somewhere first (expand widgets if you’re doing such template changes on Blogger) as things can go wrong and be very very hard to recover from. You’ve been warned! (But don’t let that put you off trying altogether).

So in my case, I wanted to install the custom tracking javascript supplied by StatCounter. Here’s what you do.

1 – Log into your Tumblr Account.

2 – Click the “Customise” link.

3 – Click “Theme” and then select “Use Custom HTML”.

4 – Scroll to the end of the code and paste your StatCounter code JUST BEFORE the < /body>  </html> tags.

5 – Don’t forget to click “Save Changes”.

6 – Log back into your StatCounter account to check that it is recording visits (unless you’ve purposefully blocked your IP address from being recorded as a visit).

You can find out more about using StatCounter – a FREE visitor tracking counter at StatCounter

Jonathan Crouch is Technical Partner and website designer for Fabulous Photo Gifts – personalised photo gift company. In his quieter moments, he blogs ‘how-to’ and ‘SEO’ self help articles for small businesses and individuals, based on his own years of experience. Website: http://www.fabulousphotogifts.co.uk Blog: http://purple13.blogspot.com Tumblr: http://fabulousphotogifts.tumblr.com/
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A blog, believe it or not, when properly prepared creates content, and quite often is put very fast in the top ten of Google. Why it is so, try reading the following contribution to enlighten yourself:

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

Securing website is a big challenge for web master. It includes server protection and website protection itself. Situation becomes more difficult when you are using some famous platform for your web site.

As wordpress expert, my aim is to secure and give maximum protection to my clients’ web site. We have to think as a hacker to block all possible ways of hacking a wordpress.

Let’s go through the complete process of securing our wordpress installation.

Securing User Name:-

Most crucial and important part of securing wordpress is to change its default user name “admin”, making your website vulnerable to brute force attach and hacking scripts. If you have access to cpanel use phpmyadmin and go to table containing name user. Edit this table and change the admin name to choice of yours.

Or create a new user with full admin power and login through that id and delete the admin user.

Strong Password:-

Always use strong password to harden the security of website. Article from blogsecurity.net is describing the unique script which is used by hackers to guess the password. Our recommendation for password complexity is;

• Choose password of at least 12 character,
• Password should contain alphabet in uppercase
• Lowercase alphabet should be part of password
• Include numeric in your password to harden the security.
• Most importantly, include some special character like ~`,<?{(^% etc.

Password Encryption:-

WordPress Login and password are sent over internet using non secure protocol. Redsend.org has plug-in called chap secure login. This plug-in will

Securing website is a big challenge for web master. It includes server protection and website protection itself. Situation becomes more difficult when you are using some famous platform for your web site.

As wordpress expert, my aim is to secure and give maximum protection to my clients’ web site. We have to think as a hacker to block all possible ways of hacking a wordpress.

Let’s go through the complete process of securing our wordpress installation.

Securing User Name:-

Most crucial and important part of securing wordpress is to change its default user name “admin”, making your website vulnerable to brute force attach and hacking scripts. If you have access to cpanel use phpmyadmin and go to table containing name user. Edit this table and change the admin name to choice of yours.

Or create a new user with full admin power and login through that id and delete the admin user.

Strong Password:-

Always use strong password to harden the security of website. Article from blogsecurity.net is describing the unique script which is used by hackers to guess the password. Our recommendation for password complexity is;

• Choose password of at least 12 character,
• Password should contain alphabet in uppercase
• Lowercase alphabet should be part of password
• Include numeric in your password to harden the security.
• Most importantly, include some special character like ~`,<?{(^% etc.

Password Encryption:-

WordPress Login and password are sent over internet using non secure protocol. Redsend.org has plug-in called chap secure login. This plug-in will

Read Full Article on http://www.shinningpak.com/2010/01/9-vital-tips-to-secure-wordpress/

Imran Yousaf is Computer Science graduate and have vast experience of computer software and hardware. He has special expertise in Internet Marketing, SEO, Blogging, WordPress and Thesis customisation.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/9-vital-tips-to-secure-wordpress-1671794.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.

By Sharyce Arciaga, guest blogger

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

Most bloggers who host their own domains use cheap web hosting, especially when we first start out. As we learn more, those who want to make money from blogging start to learn about search engine optimization (SEO). 

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.

My favorite new widget for 2009 is the PayDotCom product widget. I’ve been busy today putting it on all my blogs.

The PayDotCom product widget displays links to the top-selling products in up to three categories you choose. It comes on a variety of colors to match your blog. To view the one on this blog, look in the far right column. You may have to scroll down a bit. It has a dark blue frame.

And if anyone clicks on a product in the PayDotCom widget, and ends up buying it, even months later, you get paid a commission. 

You select the categories and the widget color. PayDotCom provides a snippet of code to paste into your site. It is just that easy.

You do need to join PayDotCom first. If you have a ClickBank ID, you can elect to have the top-selling products from ClickBank in your chosen categories also be displayed.

To use that feature, you will need to join ClickBank if you don’t already have an account. (PayDotCom and ClickBank accounts are free.)

Here are a couple of quick tips:

If you decide to change the widget color, you must double-click on the new widget for it to be selected. Otherwise, you will get the old one.

Instead of copying and pasting new code to change the widget color, you can simply change the number of the “theme” in the widget code. The colors are numbered starting at one in the upper left corner and moving from left to right. If you are not changing categories, it is easier and quicker to just change the code.

Choosing blog colors often takes a backseat to choosing a good theme, installing widgets, writing posts, and all the other work involved in building and maintaining a blog. But colors are much more important than they may seem.

Here’s why:

1. Color is the first impression people have of your blog. Before they read a word or recognize the image in your header, color affects them. The effect can attract or repel them.

2. The colors of the text, type, and mouseovers on your blog have the most affect on two things:

Readability (whether your blog is easy and pleasant to read)

Legibility (whether it is possible for most people to read, without hurting their eyes)

Trust me, if it hurts their eyes to read your blog, they won’t.

3. Enhancing or cancelling your message. If you blog about business, and your blog is pink and frilly, guess what? Unless you’re Mary Kay Cosmetics, you’ve got a problem. You just won’t look business like.

4. Up to date? Or faddish? Yes, your color schemes should be up to date. But if you use the current favorite fad colors of today, guess what happens tomorrow? That’s right, your site looks outdated and boring. And that makes your ideas and offers seem outdated and boring, too.

5. Getting lost in the crowd? Go your own way! Better to blaze your own path with a classy/classic color scheme that creates a distinctive, memorable image.

6. Know your audience, and choose colors that appeal to them. In the U.S., older guys often choose supposedly macho colors (tan, gray, black, rust, orange) no matter who they are trying to communicate with. But what are they conveying? Is rust a good color if you’re selling cars or precision metal instruments? Does gray appeal to your market? Find out! Design your site to please your audience, not yourself.

Does this happen to you, too? I keep running out of text widgets. WordPress only gives you nine.

So when you have used all nine text widgets, and you just have to add one more script or ad, what do you do? If there’s a text widget immediately above or below where you want to put the new one, no problem!

1. Copy the script or code you need to add.

2. Log into your WordPress admin area.

3. Select the Presentation > Widget editor and open the existing text widget.

4. If you want to add something immediately below the existing widget, put the cursor after the existing text/script/code, and press Enter a couple of times to insert a carriage return or two. Then Paste the new code.

OR

If you want the new feature to appear above the existing one, paste the code/script at the beginning of the text, then add the carriage returns.

(You want to keep the to sets of code separate–so you can easily move the new widget when you want to.)

5. Save Changes. Then view the site to make sure everything looks the way you want it to.

6. If you want to add a line of white space to separate the two features (that are now sharing the same text widget), go back to Presentation > Widgets and open the text widget again. In the blank space between the two sets of code/script, type this:

Then save the changes and view the site again.

So far this has always worked for me. Have you tried it yet? I hope it works well for you, too. Either way, come back and leave a comment to let us know.