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Category: Blogging

  • The Best Search Engine Optimization & Marketing Resources

    Nothing beats good, orginal content, but also nothing beats knowing that you are using the best techniques and procedures, for getting that content recognized, for inspiring you and your subconscious mind, to produce even more great, orginal content. When the bases are covered, the inspiration for hitting a homer increases. Your ego can be a dragon that stops you, but your subconscious' desire for some recognition is not a self serving type of desire. It's an affect of the higher goal of being the most helpful and useful that you can be. In this case recognition can mean authentication, and also in the virtuous circle motif, authentication can lead to well deserved recognition. Maybe a perpetual motion machine exists after all. Here are some sites with information and tools to reach the maximal audience who is interested, or who may not even know they are interested, until they find you, in content related to your work, so that your subconscious has the most motivation to be original and to follow its bliss, which ironically leads to even better content. In other words, winning awards, can make your higher self work harder. Getting a No.1 record, for instance, usually makes a musician practice his guitar more. A "break" means you are given the luxury of more time to spend on your craft.
    • http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ - Official News on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index. Google webmaster blog is well known as highly informative and as being reputable. And why not? It's straight from the horse's mouth, Google itself.
    • http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/ - Bing has a good webmaster blog too.
    • http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp - Google has just started a video channel for webmasters. Plenty of videos up already to answer common questions.
    • http://www.seobook.com/blog -  by Aaron Wall. Learn.Rank.Dominate. They sell an SEO training program for $150, but also have a free blog with lots of free, valuable information. Looks legit and reputable.
    • Highrankings.com - by Jill Whalen. They also primarily offer a paid for, but legit, consulting service. But there are lots of free articles on the site with a lot of great information.
    • Yahoo Search Blog - Yahoo's equivalent of the Google and Bing Webmaster blogs. A look inside the world of search from the people at Yahoo!
    • SEO Moz -  Seo Moz serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help every SEO to be the best they can be.
    • Blackwater Ops - Also primarily a paid consulting offering, but also many free articles and information to get your juices flowing.
    • NowSourcing - Social Media Marketing explained. You’ll tend to find original content relevant to social media here, not just another top 10 list. One guy said about this service, "The only SEO that has been able to show me actual results"
    • Virante - They have a lot of Free expert SEO tools here.
    • Century House - Eating competitors for breakfast.
    • The Blog of Matt Cutts - Most engaged Google engineer on the social networks, namely Twitter. He's currently head of Google's webspam team, but he's also worked for years on search quality there. He knows and shares a lot of useful tips and information. Great, nice guy. He would be what Chris Brogan has termed a "Trust Agent."
    • Search Engine Land -  Must read news about search marketing and search engines. One of the best sites for Search related news.
    • Google Blogoscoped - A site that covers Google primarily and updates you on new developments there especially as its related to social media, marketing, search.
    • Google Operating System - Unofficial news and tips about Google.
    • The Digital Point Forum - A great forum discussing all the search engines, marketing, and design & development. One guy said about this forum, "I've implemented some of their recommendations thus far and I feel like it's already making a difference."
    • Google Webmaster Central Webmasters/Site Owner's Help -  Google's HTML documentation for Webmaster Essentials, Tools, Relationships, and Sitemaps.
    • Google Webmaster Central Help Forum - All about crawling, indexing, and ranking, plus tools and even chit-chat.
    • Eric Goldman - Specifically the legal aspects of search, but also a lot of broader information and observations that are worthwhile.
    • SEO by the Sea - Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services, Consulting, and Research. Also talks about patents related to SEO/SEM search. This and the last are really good sources of information about blogging in general too.
    • The Google Cache - Must read SEO blog. Web Marketing, SEO, CPC/PPC Blog.
    • A simple Delicious Search for "SEO" - Search list results about SEO provided by Delicious.
    • Search Engine Guide - The small business guide to search marketing. Small business help for website promotion and increased search engine traffic. Great advice from solid writers.
    • Small Business SEM - Because not everyone can throw thousands of dollars at the ‘How do we market ourselves online?’ question… Also featuring the SEO Success Pyramid.
    • Link Moses - Link building strategies.14 years of advice, rants, and tips on link building strategy and content publicity.
    • Link Building Best Practices - Q&A with Eric Ward, aka LinkMoses, Questions, answers, opinions and advice on link building best practices based on his personal experiences as a content publicist for thousands of websites from 1994 until today.
    • Yoast - specializing in WordPress SEO. Tweaking websites, from search engine rankings to speed and user experience. Joost de Valk and guests provide tips on optimizing WordPress, Magento, search engine rankings, analytics, and website performance. They also offer SEO tools, Magento extensions, and WordPress plug-ins to make it all possible.
    • SEO Quake - a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox, aimed at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.
    • Web Page FX -WebpageFX is a leader in web designweb developmentInternet marketingecommerce,flash design, and search engine optimization. We offer web solutions worldwide with a specific emphasis on companies in the Central Pennsylvania and Mid-Atlantic regions.
    • World Wide Web Consortium - for brushing up on the compliance side of things (even if it gets a bit technical). It's the standards by which the web runs, from the horses mouth, so to speak.
    • QuickSprout - by Neil Patel. How to Optimize your blog for Search Engines. "Over the past few years I worked with 30 of the top 100 blogs to help them increase their traffic. The thing that all of these blogs have in common is that they have great content. But one thing that most of these blogs didn’t do right is leverage search engines."( *WARNING - This is a great blogpost, and the guy looks legit and his blog as whole seems like an awesome resource, but I put that bit of code he mentions between the <TITLE> tags in the header of my WordPress Blog, and it broke my site. Was down for a whole day. Just taking the code out didn't work. I had to COMPLETELY RE-INSTALL, a major headache. Maybe I have a crappy theme. Don't doubt it, its free, and I know WordPress and PHP are possessed, but still a WORD OF WARNING about that CODE.)
    • Black Hat World - An SEO forum and community.
    • SEO Book for Bloggers - The blogger's guide to SEO. What Google knows about your blog.
    • Graywolf's SEO Blog - Michael Gray became involved in web development and website management in 1998. He was Webmaster for a major specialty retailer, helping create their website presence and growing their online sales from less than $10,000 a month to over $25 million in annual web sales.
    • WordPress TV - WordPress SEO and Optimization strategies. An outstanding presentation.
    • Yoast WordPress SEO - The definitive guide to higher rankings for your blog by Yoast. 2009 Semmy Winner.
    • Dragon Search - DragonSearch is a search engine marketing company with offices in New York City and Kingston, New York in the Hudson Valley region specializing in a wide range of search engine marketing consulting for online marketing and advertising ventures of all website and industry types.
    • StomperNet - This one is PAID ONLY, but it's folks have been recommended by reputable people so I thought I would still include it. Stomping the Search Engines. You will know SEO inside and out because when it comes to teaching SEO for business owners, no one knows it better than StomperNet.
    • Confidential SEO Secrets Book - Revised and expanded August 2009. This is a book, so again, its not free, but came recommended. By Allen Harkleroad.
    • Flowtown - How to use Social Media to expand your SEO horizons.
    • SEO Mash - A mash up of a plethra of SEO, blogging, and Website resources.
    • Alltop - the mega-aggregator from Guy Kawasaki and company has an SEO category
    • OnReact - A real time feed for everything in the Social Media Sphere that gets voted up via social media services such as Twitter.
    • Wiep - an internet marketing blog with link building as the main dish. Different link building strategies get discussed here, as well as several other search engine optimization related subjects.
    • Blind Five Year Old - a product of A.J. Kohn, an experienced marketing executive with a successful track record spanning nearly 20 years.The name of the blog comes from his search engine optimization (SEO) philosophy, which is to treat search engines like they are blind five year olds.
    • Wafer Scale - SEO tips for your blog, and bloggin tips to increase your traffic.
    Do you have any more suggestions that I can add to the list? I would love to hear from you.

  • How to Position An Adsense Ad within a Widget


    So yesterday I was experimenting with some new themes and found one I liked that utilized those tall, thin “Skyscraper” Adsense ads. It had a left sidebar which I was looking for because I thought I read somewhere that the left side of the page is better on Google’s “heat map.” And then I read somewhere else that the right side was better. So who knows? Do you know?

    Well anyway the only problem was that the side bar was a lot wider than the ad, and simply inserting the Adsense code made the ad show up to the far left of the sidebar. It didn’t look right or appealing. So I googled. Right? What did I google?

    • How to position “and” adsense ad within a widget
    • How to position an adsense ad within a widget
    • How to position a java script
    • How to position a Java script Adsense Code

    That last one did the trick. About the third result brought me to this page where I found the simple answer, although it’s a little bit down the page and I had to read a bunch of gobledy-goo techno stuff I didn’t understand first.

    But the simple answer is using the DIV tag like so:

    <div style=”float: right; margin: 10px;”>
    (Insert Adsense Code Here)
    </div>

    Then you tweak it how you like. For instance that exact code moved my ad too far to the right, and I had to tweak my margin to 35px to center it. But you get the picture. However I had to deactivate the theme. I don’t know if there is some bad code in it, or if my servers were just having a problem because my pages suddenly were taking minutes to load, and it was the same for trying to work within the WordPress console itself. Too bad. It was a nice looking theme. Maybe I’ll try it again to see whether it was my servers or not.

    Anyway hope that helps. As far as top and bottom positioning, I don’t know. Do you know? I would guess you would use the DIV tag again and some kind of Top or bottom float assignment to it. Just guessing. Of course if I ever need that, I can just Google, right? There’s no need for instruction manuals anymore. Google is the instruction manual. Save the paper. Apple does.

    Credit goes to Max Bulber and WMtips.com for this one. Thanks Max. I just bookmarked you in Delicious.

    Credit: http://www.wmtips.com/adsense/how-insert-adsense-chitika-javascript-code.htm

  • An Easy Step To Increase Your Blog’s Exposure

    *Update 10/28/09 – You know something cool that I just noticed: The post you make on FriendFeed itself gets indexed on Google. Type into Google: Increasing Blog Exposure. My Friendfeed Post is No.1! At least as of now. That’s not a bad keyword to rank No.1 on. Now its not a direct link to this post, but a direct link to the post I made in FriendFeed that has a link to this very post. It may be because there are 4 “Likes” and a few comments on the post itself that give it that extra juice, but that’s good if Google takes that into consideration because it’s using FriendFeed’s meta data to point to more relevant information. I may have mentioned it before, but by posting to FriendFeed you also get the benefit of an automatic back link. Same for Twitter. Oh, I would also say, make a Facebook “page” for your blog and post there too. I’m assuming since “pages” are public that they are indexed too, but I’m not sure on that point. Still it can’t hurt. You can also look for Facebook “Groups” that relate to your topic and post there, but you don’t get any media to put with it and you have to do them individually one by one. I’m hoping that since Facebook bought FriendFeed, they’ll be adding some it’s functionality there soon. Because Facebook has almost as many uniques as Google itself does! Massive untapped potential!

    If you’re not a member already, join FriendFeed, a free microblogging network that is like the Twitter that we always wished that were. FriendFeed has a number of cool features absent in Twitter, namely in line media, uploading files, way better search, and for the purposes of this blog post, most importantly “Groups.”

    Groups in FriendFeed is like a regular account but narrowed to a specific topic and most of the groups, once you join, allow anyone to post to them. So when you have finished a blog post go into FriendFeed and search for groups around your topic. You go into “browse/edit groups” and then at the top right there’s a link to “Find Groups” in which you can type a search term.

    For instance when I release a new song I’ve recorded, I search for groups around music and join them. The other day I released a new song and did just that. There were a number of Groups concerning Music, some with thousands of members, some with hundreds, some with just a few. I chose to join 10 groups to start, there are many more, that I will probably add later.

    Here’s the cool part: You only have to post one time to add the post to as many groups as you want. It’s like Twitter but you get more text to write, I think around 250 characters, and you can upload a photo and or a media file (in my case a song) with the post.


    And as opposed to Twitter where you have to depend on the number of followers you have, and even then, there’s probably on a few percent of those who may be interested in the particular topic that you’ve written about that day, with Groups on FriendFeed, the members of those Groups don’t have to be following you to see the post, and they are already interested in the topic, so that even in a small group of only 20 or so, you’re going to get more engagement.

    So the benefit with posting to FriendFeed Groups is that you can post just one time and get in front of an interested audience automatically, with the added benefits of a photo, media, and more text to grab their attention. Also, FriendFeed doesn’t shorten your link, so that viewers are more likely to feel safer and click it.

    Now the drawback is that FriendFeed is small, but not too small (around a million uniques per month), and the topics and by its nature the membership leans more towards the tech arena. So for instance a topic like “Blogging” which is what this blog post is about it, has a lot of Groups, but a topic like “Knitting” may have very few or none at all (I haven’t checked) But I did have no problem finding quite a few groups around Music and Wine, the topic of a couple of my recent blog posts.

    So depending on the topic this step may get you from quite a lot, to only a small amount of extra exposure. But with the ease with which its done, and the level of engagement that follows, its more than well worth it.

    Also, it adds you some Google juice because the FriendFeed pages and Groups (unless they are private) aren’t behind a walled garden and are optimized for search. Plus you’ll be part of a like minded community to engage with, make new contacts, and increase your knowledge.

    Oh, and did I also tell you that you’re post will automatically be Tweeted to your Twitter account by FriendFeed, if you so choose, as well?

    Related Articles:

    1. How to Find Something to Blog About
    2. Increase Visitor Length Time on Your Blog
    3. An Easy Step to Increase Your Blog’s Authenticity
    4. The Best Commenting Engine for Your Blog
    5. The No. #1 Skill Needed To Become a Successful Blogger
    6. Customize Your WordPress Page Tab Links
  • How to Find Something To Blog About

    “Everything important always begins from something trivial.” – Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the U.S. 2006

    *Update 10/27/09 This is probably already in there or at least the sense of it is, but it was like today I had nothing to write about or at least that I was interested in. And I told myself, “Don’t force it, let it come naturally.” So that would be my message: Don’t force it, but do keep in the back of your mind that any and everything you do has the potential to be a blog post. I’ve seen some great one paragraph posts. Look at this one for instance. Just a little piece of news that he was repeating. But it was timely and relevant to his topic, and he was interested in the news. I don’t know if it went viral or not, but I heard about it on twitter, considered the information valuable and signed up to receive email updates from his blog. So I know it got some sizable audience. So one idea is that you can even repeat a piece of news, especially if its timely and you are interested in it. Interest creates energy, so that your likely to add your own additional content or “take” on the news to your post as well. When all else fails you can simply copy and paste another blog post or news story as your post, as long as you are really interested in the subject and/or it’s related to your site. Of course give full credit to the origin and a link as well. An example is what I did here. I’m highly interested in the story and also it’s relevant part of my business (I’m Re-Selling Rackspace Cloud Sites). I wouldn’t do it too often. I think I’ve done it twice here on my  blog out of about a hundred posts, but it is another option.

    *Update 10/22/09

    Commenting as Sources for Posts

    Here’s an additional tip I just thought of while I was commenting on someone else’s blog. I personally don’t comment that often, so it’s usually something I’m very interested in, so when I do comment, my comments tend to be long, almost like blog posts themselves. So, whenever you comment on something that you’re very interested in, consider making that comment, maybe with a little editing and copywriting, a blogpost. It may contain useful information that’s helpful to someone.

    ___________________________________________________________

    So you want to blog every day, or at least every other day, to keep you content fresh, and to grow your traffic. But just put that into your subconscious mind and see how it reacts! Slave mentality! You’ll end up not blogging at all!

    Here’s a tip. Don’t think about blogging. Do something that interests you, whether that’s reading a book, watching a video, playing a game, whatever. Whatever interests you. Follow the thin gold string of your interest, your bliss. A lot of the time when I’m reading or watching something I’m interested in, it’ll spark a relevant thought in my head that I want to write about. Maybe its just something I want to remind myself of.

    Don’t worry so much about what your interested in as a whole, like that thing you always here from self helpers, “What’s your passion in life?” Whoa! That’s too big of an emotional chunk for your subconscious to bite off. You’ll put that one off for days, weeks, years, forever. Instead, just ask yourself “What am I interested right now this moment?” It doesn’t have to be some big topic. It can be anything: I want to read this book or blog. I want to watch this podcast or TV show. I want to go play golf. I want to learn how to use this new computer program. I want to go see this movie. Relax. The motif in fairy tales of the rider letting loose of the reins and allowing his horse to decide where to go symbolizes the Ego relaxing and letting the soul be spontaneous.

    So just follow your small interest at the moment. It will likely spark a thought that will lead to a blog post. And what’s more, following your small interests will naturally start to open doors where you didn’t know doors existed before, to quote Joseph Campbell. You’re small interests at the moment will likely coalesce into a larger shaped picture. When Einstein was young he followed his small interest in what it would be like to travel on a beam of light. That small interest lead to perhaps the most important scientific theory in history, Relativity.

    Let me give you an example. Yesterday, I had absolutely nothing to write about. I had read twitter, listened to some podcasts, but nothing really sparked my interest. I had gotten kind of burned out on some of these topics. I had basically given up on the idea that I would post anything that day. What did that do? It let go of the reins of the horse in my mind. So I was sitting around and I had the small interest in posting one of my existing articles on Digg, just to see how it worked. Instead of posting on Digg, it lead me to searching for Kevin Rose and then to a video of him on an episode of Wine Library TV with Gary V. I wasn’t interested in wine, but I was interested in watching Gary and Kevin do their schtick. It was entertaining. Then one wine in particular caught my attention. So I wrote a small blog post about it simply with the interest of remembering it for myself, nothing else. And once I started writing about it, I had fun writing and inserting the photos (I like messing with photos, its just fun for me).

    Now that particular post may not get any traffic to speak of, but you know some of my posts that have gotten the most traffic have come from just such spontaneous impulses.

    One of my most popular posts, “How to Make a Transparent Myspace Page” came just that way. I was sitting around and just had the spontaneous interest in fiddling around with my page to make it look better. I just wanted to do something for fun. I found another blog post that taught me how to do just that. And it inspired me to write my own post, so that I could remember it and have it in my own archives in case that page ever went down or I couldn’t find again for some reason. And also because I thought others might have the same interest. That’s a key point:

    Whatever interest you have at the moment, however small or insignificant if may seem, there’s bound to be others who have that same interest and are looking for more information about it.

    If all of my posts had as much traffic as that one post, my daily traffic would go up 50 times I think.

    Another point is that writing is a process of self discovery. Quite to the opposite, writing isn’t about telling people something. Writing is about learning and unexpectedly creating something you didn’t know that you knew because in the process of fun, the power of the subconscious mind is freed.

    So to boil the tip down into one statement I’d say:

    Don’t worry about blogging today. Even to the point of accepting that you aren’t. Then ask yourself, “What do I feel like doing right now?” Follow that interest of the moment. Ironically without you intending it, it’s very likely a blog post will spontaneously come out of the experience.

    What do you think? I would love to hear from you.

  • Increase Visitor Length Time on Your Blog

    The end of the latest Copyblogger post. All five links to "related articles" are to other stories on their blog

    So, I’ve been reading Copyblogger lately and I highly suggest that you do too if you are interested in blogging professionally, and one thing I noticed that they do: At the end of their posts they usually have 4 or 5 Related article links, and I know that’s nothing new, but the key is they link to related articles that are on their blog.

    So underneath all of your posts try to increase the number of related post links that link back to posts within your own blog.

    Now, depending on your topic, whether you are extremely focused like an exacto blade on one subject like Copyblogger is, or whether you have many topics like I do, this will be easier or harder to do. Of course anyone consulting someone on building a profitable blog would definitely encourage you to focus on one topic, but in my case, here I am. I have a number of interests, and I like to blog about them at different times. Maybe I’ll start to focus more in the future, but for now, here I am.

    So for someone like me this will be a gradual project, but it will be beneficial for a number of reasons:

    1. I’ll be revisiting older posts in my blog, and it’ll encourage me to research and write more posts within that category
    2. It’ll encourage me to read the current related posts on other blogs and learn more about the topic which will increase my knowledge and interest.
    3. I can curate and iterate the older posts to make them better

    Now, this is more of an art than science. If  there is a really good blog post from another site that is very relevant to your topic, you don’t want to delete that link in favor of one of your posts that may be less relevant or not as good. That would be depriving your readership and decreasing the value of your blog. But it will encourage you to read that other post and learn more from it and maybe even inspire you to write another post of your own based on your new knowledge and insight. Also this process can help your headline copywriting. For instance for this post, I can think of two other posts I’ve written related to blogging. The current headlines of the other two posts are “1 Minute Tips: Enable Easy Contact” which I’m going to change to “One Easy Step to Distinguish Your Blog’s Authenticity” and “JS-Kit: A New Opportunity for Blogging Success” which I’m going to change to “The Best Commenting Engine for Your Blog.” Can you see why I’m doing this? Since I’m putting them in related links it forces me to rethink the titles and make them more interesting and inviting. Also these headlines are more of general interest than the older specific ones, making them more searchable.

    Note, this whole process, gradual and stress free, will get you interested again in curating your blog, adding value for your readership because the links that you do leave in there will gradually be of higher value and your knowledge on the topic will grow, increasing the number of post ideas you have, and making them more valuable as well.

    Hope this little tip helps you and invigorates your interest in your blogs.

    What do you think about this technique? Am I right, am I wrong? Do you have better ideas? Love to hear what you think.

    Related Articles:

    1. An Easy Step to Increase Your Blog’s Authenticity
    2. The Best Commenting Engine for Your Blog
    3. The No. #1 Skill Needed To Become a Successful Blogger
    4. Customize Your WordPress Page Tab Links
    5. Contact Stephen

    *Tip: Screen Capture on a Mac: Command+Shift+3 for whole screen or Command+Shift+4 for a portion like I did above to capture that small shot from Copyblogger.

  • An Easy Step to Increase Your Blog’s Authenticity

    Don’t you like information that’s simple, effective and that you can put to use right away? I thought so. Me too.

    Here’s one: Put your contact information clearly on the front page of your blog.

    Notice how Guy Kawasaki notes that most bloggers don’t! I said, “What?” And then I realized, although I have a “Contact” page, mine wasn’t either. But now it is.

    Listen to Louis Gray talk about here in this video. It’s about a minute in.