Blog Optimization Tips for Top Search Engines Ranking

Bloggers who are interested in building high traffic to their blog and maintaining a successful blog should pay particular attention to search engine optimization techniques which can help to improve the search engine rankings of their blogs. Search engines all employ some type of ranking algorithm which is used to determine the order in which websites are returned when an Internet user searches for information on a particular topic. However, not all search engines use the same algorithm for this purpose. As a result there is no simple solution to optimizing a blog for high rankings on all search engines. There are a few tips though which can be useful with most search engines. These tips include using relevant keywords, generating back links to your blogs and using image tags in a beneficial way.

The Importance of Keywords

The use of relevant keywords in blog posts is one of the most common and also one of the simplest ways to optimize search engine rankings. However, not all bloggers agree on the best ways to use relevant keywords to optimize search engine rankings. Some bloggers believe keywords must be used often to create high keyword densities while others believe using keywords at lower densities of 1%-3% and paying attention to placement of the keywords is the most worthwhile strategy. Still other bloggers argue that simply using relevant keywords as they come naturally in the flow of the blog posts is sufficient to ensure search engines understand the content of the blog.

Regardless of the keyword strategy a blogger opts to employ all bloggers can benefit from researching relevant keywords. They may have a blog which pertains to a general subject such as gardening but may not be aware of the search terms typically used by Internet users when researching this subject. Fortunately there are many programs available which generate related keywords for a particular time which provides the blogger with other keywords they should consider incorporating into the blog. For the example of a blog pertaining to gardening the blogger may want to use additional keywords such as container gardening or home gardening to attract more interest from search engine users.

Generating Favorable Back Links

Back links are also another common factor used in search engine ranking algorithms. Many search engines consider the number of back links pointing to a website as well as the quality of the websites which provide these back links. This means the search engine rankings of the website which points to your blog could influence the amount of weight the back link contributes to your own rankings. This is because some search engines consider higher ranking websites to be more valuable than other websites which do not rank well and therefore reward websites receiving back links from these high ranking websites quite favorably.

Some search engine algorithms also consider whether or not the back links are reciprocated or not reciprocated. In these cases non reciprocal links are usually considered to be more valuable than reciprocal links. Also, back links which come from link exchanges or link farms are typically not considered to be very influential to search engine rankings.

How Images Can Improve Search Engine Rankings

Bloggers should also be aware that any pictures used on their blog can be used to improve search engine rankings with some search engines. This aspect of search engine optimization is often overlooked because many bloggers believe the pictures are not viewed by search engines. While this is true the search engines do crawl the code of the blog in addition to the content on the blog. This means the search engine will view the information provided in the image tags. Bloggers can take advantage of this by using the image tags to provide relevant keywords which can bolster search engine rankings. However, care should be taken to ensure the keywords used in these tags also accurately describe the image because blog visitors will often see the text included in these tags when they scroll over a picture on the blog.

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Free Traffic From Freebies

Sponsorship is a very traditional way of promoting a business. Bricks-and-mortar companies do it all the time. As long as you can see that the extra revenue the users your sponsorship efforts bring are higher than the cost of bringing them, it’s a real no-brainer — and a lot of fun too.

But there are lots of other conventional ways of promoting your business. Handing out freebies for example, is a great way of doing it.

Baseball caps, t-shirts, carrier bags, coffee mugs and key-fobs might seem low-tech but they work. The people who have them keep them. And people who don’t have them see them.

You can distribute freebies like these at any events that you attend or you can send them out as prizes to competitions on your website. It gets you visibility and it gets you extra users.

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ABOUT ADSENSE ARBITRAGE

When you come right down to it, there are really just two types of users: users you get for free and users you have to pay for.

Free users reach your site by clicking on a link. You might have to “pay” for them by placing a reciprocal link on your site, they could find you through a search engine or you might get them completely free from other publishers who want to link back to interesting content on your site. Whenever any free user clicks on one of your ads, you’re making a profit.

That’s not true of the users you buy. When you’re paying for traffic, you need to make sure that you’re receiving more in ad revenues than you’re paying for your marketing efforts.

The principle is simple. The practice requires a little effort — although not too much. In this chapter, I’m going to talk you through AdSense Arbitrage, the art of buying traffic cheap and selling it high.

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Putting Links In Articles

The principle behind trying to get links on other websites is that you want the users of that site to come to your site to read your content and see your ads.

There is an alternative strategy though: you can send your content directly to potential users.
The easiest way to do this is to add a “Send a friend” link to each article you put on your site. When the user clicks on the link, they’re given a small form to complete that asks for their name and the email address of the person they want to send the article to.

Don’t be stingy here. Make sure there’s plenty of room to add multiple addresses. You want to make it as easy as possible for your users to share your content.

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Search Engine Optimization For AdSense Sites

Submitting your site and its individual Web pages to the search engines and directories for free should get you listed. But you want to be listed right at the top of the results. When someone enters a term in a search engine, they rarely look beyond the first page.

In fact, they rarely look beyond the first few listings.

A high ranking on a search engine is going to depend on a combination of keywords and links — especially your links. I’ll talk in more detail about links below, but I’m not going to describe in detail all the different things you can do to optimize your site to get a high listing. That’s a whole other profession and there are experts out there who do nothing but SEO for clients all day long. For the most part, if you’ve got good content and build up a large network of links, you should find that your position in the search results rises higher and higher

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Viral Marketing Tips

Viral marketing is really just another way of saying "word of mouth." On the Internet though, word of mouth spreads so fast through email and websites that with the right piece of content, you can pick up thousands of new users faster than you could ever imagine.

The key to successful viral marketing is to send out something that people want to share. That can be anything from a joke, a funny story or a link to a home-made video. Millions of people tune in to watch television bloopers. If you’ve got some funny clip, you can upload it to a website, send out an email and watch it spread around the Web.

As long as a link to your AdSense site is either in the email or on the site, you can turn some of that traffic into revenue.

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Commercial Link Exchanges

All the linking strategies that I’ve been discussing so far are free. It won’t cost you a dime to get links on friends’ sites and forums but it might cost you a little time.

Commercial link exchanges cut that timeline for a fee. LinkMetro.com, for example, looks like a directory but instead of choosing sites to browse, you’re looking for places to put your links. Because you can target those sites carefully, you can safeguard your PageRank and make sure that you’re getting interested users.

Adzaar.com, AdBrite.com and LinkAdage.com all offer similar services and are worth a look if you’re thinking of building a link network fast and are prepared to pay for it.

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How to Put Links In Newsletters

Most articles are placed on websites, like the bulk of the links you use to pull in users. But sites aren’t the only places that you can post links. One of the most effectual — and neglected — places to link to your site is in newsletters.

The first option is to send articles to other publishers’ newsletters. As a publisher, you’ll likely find yourself subscribing to all sorts of email newsletters related to another aspects of your business. There’s no harm in writing to the owners of one of those newsletters and request if they want an article. Again, you can offer a link on your own website in return.
And you should also be sending your own newsletter. That won’t take you new users but it will make sure that your old users come back.

That’s very important. If a user has already clicked on a link to your site and been impressed enough to subscribe to your newsletter, then he’s pretty interested in your content. You’ve already worked or paid for that user, so you want to make sure you keep him. Sending a regular newsletter keeps users like these coming back.

In fact, you don’t even have to create any more content than usual if you don’t want to. You can merely take the opening paragraphs of each of the posts you’ve launched over the last couple of weeks, paste them into a template and add “Read more” at the end, with a link to each of the articles.

That’s very easy and it will help to make sure that your site go along to build a good base of users. It will also put you in prime position when Google starts letting you put AdSense in newsletters. They’re already doing this for some major publishers and it’s likely that that’s going to be rolled out properly at some point in the future.

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Gateway Pages For AdSense Publishers

Site architecture used to be jolly straightforward. You market a home page and let your exploiter use your navigation to find the subject matter on the rest of your site.

That’s fine if your site just has a smattering of Web pages, all of them covering just one theme. But for sites that have hundreds or thousands of posts on a range of another subjects, you need to have multiple introduction points, or gateways. So if you have a site about digital cameras, for example, you’d still advance your home page. But you would also promote separately the page about one particular brand of camera, the page about printing digital pictures and the page about camera lenses. Expose those pages to users who are looking for those specific topics would bring in more traffic than merely telling Google or Yahoo! that the site is about “digital cameras.”

That principal holds true for any website, but it’s especially true for AdSense sites.

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Getting Listed On Google

You can use a new service that Google is currently testing, called Sitemaps. This offers some fantastic tools that makeskeeping track of your site’s ranking (and any problems with thatranking) a breeze. You’ll be able to learn which of your URLs Google has had trouble crawling and the reasons they couldn’t crawl them; the common text in external links to your site (so you’ll know what your users were looking at before they reached you); and best of all, the most common search queries that sent users to you.

It will also help Google keep up to date easily with pages that have been updated. For an AdSense site that’s very important. While it’s possible that you’ll have static content and focus on bringing streams of users in to view it, it’s more likely that you’re going to be adding pages and posts to keep visitors coming back and fresh ads going up.

Sitemaps should help Google list those new entries much faster, giving you users for those pages right away. You can take a look at Sitemaps, and submit your site at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/. You just have to enter you URL, verify that you’re the owner by uploading some metatag information, and you’ll pick up a ton of valuable traffic information for free.

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