WordPress Hosting: What To Look For In A Webhost

WordPress, perhaps one of the most popular blogging platforms to date, isn’t exactly the first priority of every webhost around. Many webhosts are too general to provide optimal support for a specific product like WordPress. But if you value your blog, and are serious with its development and growth, looking for a webhost with WordPress-specific options would be in your best interest.

Common Features In WordPress Hosts

Above all else, WordPress should be simple to install. Several different administration panels allow for the instant installation of the script, such as cPanel. cPanel is run on the vast majority of all webhosts, so nearly every webhost user should have access to WordPress.

When it comes to security, bloggers prefer WordPress-specific webhosts. This is mainly due to the fact that when important security releases are circulated, normal webhosts aren’t always the first to get their auto-installers updated with the new information. WordPress-specific webhosts are much more “on the ball” in this sense, as they are always kept updated on new releases.

When a blogger needs to upgrade a blog, he or she will soon find that the “one-click” upgrade feature most webhosts have is very dangerous. These installers write over previous files: meaning that old themes, plugins, and other content can be lost for good. In this case, WordPress-specific hosts take the win as they allow for better upgrading options.

When it comes to databases, more traffic means more entropy. Database operations require extra performance- meaning extra bandwidth. If a blog is hosted on a normal host, bandwidth probably isn’t something they have a surplus of. WordPress-specific webhosts take this into account, and offer better optimization for their users.

Added Benefit For Bloggers

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress hosts is the fact that they tend to offer free content to WordPress users. You shouldn’t be surprised to see free WordPress themes, plugins, and content from these webhosts. Try finding these benefits from normal webhosts- odds are you won’t.

The great thing about getting free themes from WordPress hosts is the fact that no one else has them. This means that you can have a professionally designed blog at no extra cost, compared to the hundreds of dollars it would take to get a custom WordPress theme designed and coded.

Compared to the exclusivity of other methods, such as getting a custom design laid out and coded, the webhosting route is much cheaper. Getting custom designs can easily run hundreds of dollars, and sometimes that isn’t counting the coding of the design!

When we add the score up, it seems that the WordPress hosts come out on top. But be sure to get quotes from several sources before making your decision. After all, a website is only as good as its host!

How To Properly Adhere To Web Design Practices

Building the best design out there isn’t going to be easy. But in the process of practice and adhering to common design principles, web designers can get a good start on making their own unique designs. But before this can be done, there are guidelines in making a generally sound web layout.

Before all sorts of colors, tables, and shapes are created- the concept of the readability of a website needs to be learned. The reader of the website is the target here, and how well they can read the content is the goal that needs to be achieved. Common practice states that a 10 pixel font or higher is sufficient, but going for bigger fonts is always appealing to Internet users.

Navigation is an aspect of web design that is a very close second to readability. Without proper navigation, a website will not provide the average Internet user with proper information on what they can access on the website. It isn’t the 1990’s anymore, and that just isn’t acceptable! Pretty rollover effects and menus aren’t a necessity, and the average navigation box is more than sufficient for most applications in web design.

As most Internet users should know by now, there are a plethora of different web browsers to choose from. Everything from Mozilla Firefox to Internet Explorer and much more are being used by millions worldwide. Sadly, this means that developers need to optimize their code for each and every browser to render correctly. This requries proper coding skills, which are a great asset to have for larger and more important designs.

How well one’s creativity can flow is another important aspect that dictates how well a design is received. Using a wide range of colors, shapes, and different types of fonts can do wonders for a design project. Try to keep colors contrasted orr supplemented nicely, as “loud” and gaudy layouts are usually very good for readability as they are quite distracting. This remains to be a decision to the designer, however.

Lastly, it’s a good idea to make use of previously popular web design tactics. Newer and better forms of web design options are great to engage in, but the popular forms of web design options have been made popular for a reason- they are visually appealing and they just work. Thus, it’s always nice to conform to certain web design trends even if a unique look is desired. It isn’t always so much as trying to create a unique design as it is trying to create a unique experience for the Internet user viewing it.

In Conclusion

Web design is a very tough industry to get into. There are many aspects in design and coding that need to be learned, and much of it isn’t something that’s going to be learned overnight. Thus, aspiring web designers should try to strive and mimic other designs and coding principles before trying to make the next big thing in web design. We have to walk before we can crawl- and patience is definitely a virtue in the concept of web design.

Providing Affordable Web Hosting Solution

The contents of your website will affect the amount of money you have to pay to your Web Hosting service. Although your website only consists of some web pages, but if you also provide streaming video or audio to visitors, the cost of bandwidth is something you should take into consideration very carefully.

It is highly recommended to opt for a plan that allows you to use bandwidth more than your current requirement so anything you use over it will not cost you extra usage fees. The storage capacity you need depends on the type of website you intend to build.

For instance, if you have a plan to build an article directory where the web space required would grow rapidly you should think about the cost of that extra web space you would need. If your business plan involves the usages of more than one websites, consider to use a web hosting provider which gives you a facility to host all of your domains under one account.

That way it doesn’t matter how many domain names you host, you only have to pay for one hosting account. It is also a good idea to thing about the cost of using an add-on domain in case you want to build more websites later. Look at what kind of policies an Affordable Web Hosting company has. Will they charge you automatically when the web space or the bandwidth you use have reached the limit?

Avoiding surprises is a necessity in business, especially when it comes to extraneous costs. Those are some essential rules in finding an affordable web hosting plan. Keep in mind that today the count of Web Hosting providers is endless and most of them claim as the number one company in the world with the very best cheap rates. Before finalizing on a Web Hosting service, do your homework and plan ahead.

Nowadays, because of the competition is getting harder, many Web Hosting companies don’t charge you for setting up a new account.

So if you find the one that does it, simply go to other companies. Are there any extra charges for any application or database you might need to make sure that you don’t have to spend extra money for setting up databases, putting FrontPage on your site, creating email accounts and using other common applications? They all should be free. Some web hosting providers allow you to build unlimited number of databases and email accounts.

Finding Cheap Affordable Web Hosting

The contents of your website will affect the amount of money you have to pay to your Web Hosting service. Although your website only consists of some web pages, but if you also provide streaming video or audio to visitors, the cost of bandwidth is something you should take into consideration very carefully.

It is highly recommended to opt for a plan that allows you to use bandwidth more than your current requirement so anything you use over it will not cost you extra usage fees. The storage capacity you need depends on the type of website you intend to build.

For instance, if you have a plan to build an article directory where the web space required would grow rapidly you should think about the cost of that extra web space you would need. If your business plan involves the usages of more than one websites, consider to use a web hosting provider which gives you a facility to host all of your domains under one account.

That way it doesn’t matter how many domain names you host, you only have to pay for one hosting account. It is also a good idea to thing about the cost of using an add-on domain in case you want to build more websites later. Look at what kind of policies an Affordable Web Hosting company has. Will they charge you automatically when the web space or the bandwidth you use have reached the limit?

Avoiding surprises is a necessity in business, especially when it comes to extraneous costs. Those are some essential rules in finding an affordable web hosting plan. Keep in mind that today the count of Web Hosting providers is endless and most of them claim as the number one company in the world with the very best cheap rates. Before finalizing on a Web Hosting service, do your homework and plan ahead.

Nowadays, because of the competition is getting harder, many Web Hosting companies don’t charge you for setting up a new account.

So if you find the one that does it, simply go to other companies. Are there any extra charges for any application or database you might need to make sure that you don’t have to spend extra money for setting up databases, putting FrontPage on your site, creating email accounts and using other common applications? They all should be free. Some web hosting providers allow you to build unlimited number of databases and email accounts.

Looking for Cheap Web Hosting

The best part of cheap web hosting plans is that setup fees, monthly fees or any other extra charges are almost negligible. In cheap hosting packages no doubt, prices are very cheap but you have to live with limited resources like CPU time and other server related resources. You also have to keep in mind that you are sharing servers with other customers so you are at the mercy of the performance of their sites as well.

Look for a web hosting company which has earned a good reputation from years of operations among its user base is considered reliable. Cheap web hosting companies and services must score well on the criteria of reliability, package value, customer service, and control panel, user-friendliness and server uptime.

Cheap web hosting service providers must give a sufficient space to store the data or files that structure your website as this industry is very competitive. A good low cost web hosting provider will also offer a relatively high bandwidth so that you website can be fairly busy before you hit any limits.

The best cheap web hosting companies provides 24 hours technical support. More advanced web site developers can make use any specialized software like a content management system, web log, customer support, discussion board or a shopping cart system in order to get the most out of the hosting package features. Most of the web hosting companies are offering user friendly website designs and editing tools like FrontPage, Dreamweaver or Coffee Cup support.

A quality cheap web hosting provider will support all the big programming languages and offer you a liberal programming environment so that you can develop your business using state of the art tools. Other reason is that cheap hosting providers adopts diverse business structure in comparison to older companies. Certainly, Web hosting business is severely competitive. Recently, the basis of competition is the tools and features provided to the user.

When one talk about this sort of strategy the major drawback is that every user doesn’t require all the features provided by the concern hosting company. Several hosting providers deliver free backup services for all their clients without any biasness. Off course, Backups are expensive, and it is not required by everyone, but every user is compelled to pay for it due to concerned package offered to them.

Affordable Shared Web Hosting Plan

When the service provider serves pages for multiple Web sites, each having its own Internet domain name, from a single Web server, it is known as shared web hosting. Such websites need a dedicated web server. Shared web hosting is gaining popularity as most webmasters look for affordable hosting plans to host their websites.

These sites need a dedicated Web server, either provided by a Web hosting service or maintained in-house. Shared web hosting make possible to host websites on a powerful server at reduced cost, that’s why it’s the most popular among webmasters. Shared web hosting also has its own advantages over other web hosting plans

Shared web hosting provides uptime and fast connectivity. It’s the most time saving hosting plan a webmaster can opt for hosting his/her website. It does not require the webmasters to have more advanced technical knowledge about the hosting plans. Shared web hosting always come with multiple domains, multiple email addresses and usually a number of one click software installs.

The most striking feature of shared hosting is its cost, shared web hosting come up with low cost. The cost of maintaining a server is divided among all the webmasters sharing the same server. Therefore the particular amount paid by an individual reduces at certain level.

Shared web hosting plan is convenient to execute. It requires least website setup time as well as fastest activation. A standard shared web hosting package usually includes disk storage space, the ability to transfer a certain amount of data, the ability to forward your emails and a file transfer protocol service.

Shared web hosting plans are fully managed, the company providing you web hosting services is responsible for the maintenance and updates as well as the technical assistance for your website.

Control panel for shared web hosting come in several ways like CPanel, H-sphere or some other name. No such hurdles come your way. Shared web hosting with control panel has several other advantages.

Hosting Your Website In Missouri

Do you live in Missouri and need a webhosting company that will host your website for you? I’m not sure why you may need a host that has their office in Missouri, but nonetheless, any great webhost will suit your needs.

The most important factors you should keep in mind when choosing a webhost will consist of storage space, bandwidth amount, the speed of your server, and how long your site stays active before a reboot.

Another aspect that you should be looking for is the visitor load that your server can handle. Can your server or hosting plan handle an extreme amount of visitors at the same time or will it slow down like a turtle?

If you want to save yourself a bit of money then you should also look for unlimited domains. By having unlimited domains as an option with your hosting plan, you can put up any number of sites all on the same hosting account.

Are you poor in web design? If you are, you may be inclined to find a webhost that also gives you free templates to choose from. This way you can create your site within a few hours and put it live on the internet.

Can you remember the days when we used to pay hundreds of dollars for just an average webhost? Not anymore.

Remember that the key features you want to watch for include the basics of any strong webhosting package. The standard features you need a lot of include bandwidth, storage, and speed. Anything else is just bonus, so don’t focus on the goodies unless you need them.

Your host is the spine of your business. If your webhost cannot properly serve your website your sales and visitor count will suffer.

Repeat visitors and the word of mouth about your business is what is going to keep you going. Get a good webhost, with great speed, lots of room, and you will be good to go.

5 Great Features of Yahoo Web Hosting

Yahoo Web Hosting has many features to offer when choosing a web hosting provider! Yahoo offers a great introductory price with upfront savings. Yahoo web hosting will even wave the initial set up fees, offer you a free domain name, offer great introductory rates and even reduce monthly costs.

Plentiful features that Yahoo Web Hosting has to offer include excellent site management and a domain name that comes for free. If you are looking for a great place for a web hosting provider with many other features, then Yahoo Web Hosting has much to offer you. The following are 5 great features of yahoo web hosting…

1. Yahoo Site Solutions – One exciting feature that you will find when using Yahoo Web Hosting is that there are great tools such as Yahoo Site Solutions. It is available to help you build your yahoo web site. Whether you want to start totally from scratch and make your site have your own design or if you want to choose from the hundreds of templates, Yahoo Site Solutions will get you there.

2. Unlimited Web Hosting – Yahoo’s new upgrade to their web hosting platform includes Unlimited Disk Space, Data Transfer and Email Storage.

3. Free Yahoo Domain Name – Yahoo offers a free domain for $1.99 for the first year and then $9.95 for subsequent years.

4. Unlimited Web Hosting – Yahoo’s new and improved web hosting plan whcih combines all 3 plans into 1 and comes with Unlimited Disk Space, Data Transfer and Email Storage. No other web hosting provider offers so much!

5. Customer Support – 24 Hours a Day – If you decide to go with Yahoo Hosting, you will have an additional benefit of 24/7 free customer support. No matter what time of the day or night it may be, Yahoo will be there to help you with your questions. They offer a toll free telephone number that you can reach them, and they also have email support that is available around the clock too. Yahoo also has excellent video tutorials that can help you get started with any web hosting package.

These 5 features are a great beginning on why anyone should choose a Yahoo Web Hosting Plan. These are 5 points that will help you decide if you want to create a yahoo web site for yourself. Yahoo Web Hosting will amaze you with how easy it is to build a web site.

Part Three Of A Blogging Masterclass

More Traffic Sources

Getting links from other websites is not the only way to attract visitors to visit your blog. This time, we are going to explore alternative methods to attract high quality traffic with both free and paid methods.

The first thing you can do to generate traffic is to recycle all the content you have written on your blog. What I really mean is to turn your blog posts into little “manuals” or articles that help people solve their problems or offer valuable information and submit them to article directories. These article directories are like aggregators that collect articles of similar themes together in one place, so they receive thousands and thousands of qualified visitors every day.

When you submit your articles to these directories, you are exposing your name to the thousands of pairs of eyes visiting them for free! On most article directories, you are also permitted to include a “resource box” where you can include your contact details, a simple biography and so on. This is where you can truly leverage the traffic of the said article directories.

Some good article directories to get you started are www.eZineArticles.com, www.ultimatearticledirectory.com and www.submityourarticle.com.

Another excellent way to gain traffic is to join internet forums that is based on your niche. To find these kind of forums, just go to any search engine and enter ” +forum”, without the quotes. You would want the most focused forum with a substantial number of active members, and preferably always bustling with activity. Just check the dates of the threads posted on the forum.

When you join active forums that focus on your field of discussion and post very useful and valuable posts, your peers will start noticing you and paying attention to what you have to say. In most forums, you are also allowed to append a link to your site in the signature line, which is under every post you make on the forums. People will click and visit your blog if they find your posts helpful and informative. This way, your credibility is built even before they land on your blog, so traffic from the forums would be easier to turn into profits if your blog is selling your own products or recommending others’ as an affilliate since they are already convinced you’re an “expert” in the field.

The strategy we’ll discuss is word of mouth. Let’s say you already have a daily visitor count of 100. What if you compiled a small report or gift and posted it on your blog, saying that if a certain visitor can refer three of his/her friends to visit your blog the gift will be his/hers for free? If your small report or gift is lucrative enough, it will generate a small buzz among your blog readers and they will surely refer their friends to this blog that they frequent!

You can also utilize the “blog and ping” technique that everyone’s talking about. Basically, when you update your blog, you can let blog portals such as www.technorati.com know by pinging them. You can ping a lot of portals at once by using the free www.pingomatic.com.

Besides the techniques described here, there are also paid methods like buying links from high-ranking pages or buying banner advertisement space. A thing to keep in mind when buying paid traffic is to always weigh your profits generated from the paid ads. If your profits do no offset the expense, you will end up losing money, so choose wisely.

Monetizing Your Blog

You have been working hard to produce good-quality, original content on your blog and you have attracted a decent amount of traffic by doing so. However, money is not going to appear out of thin air just because you have traffic. You have to turn your traffic into money.

There are several ways to generate profits from the visitors of your blog, and Google’s Adsense programme allows you to do so with ultimate ease. First, visit their website at http://adsense.google.com/. You’ll find out more about their advertising programme there, but here are some extra bits I’d like to tell you.

First, Google’s Adsense programme is a really useful way to monetize your blog because when users finish reading your newest post, chances are they want to leave your blog because they have nothing else to do on your blog. If your Adsense advertisement block is visible on your blog, they might see advertisements relevant to them and click on them to exit your blog. Ka-ching! You’ve just cashed in on your first virtual cents!

But yes, your profits will only be cents if you don’t “do it right”. This involves placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors. Consult the page https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to see the “heat map” of your blog. The “hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances of someone looking at your blog.

Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the colour of your advertisement text and links. You will want them to match the colours on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s that simple.

Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors buy from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and it is very easy to start because you don’t have to create your own products or services.

Anyway, let’s refer back to our technological gadgets blog example. Let’s say you discover this Gadget X on a merchant’s website, and they offer an affilliate programme. What you would do is to create a post in your blog and do a mini-review on this Gadget X. Rip it apart and point out its benefits and bad points, if any, and include a link (which is given by the merchant) for the visitor to purchase the Gadget X online.

If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant will track from the link that the purchase is referred by you, so they will send you your share of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product, and you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase! If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheque for you just for writing about ONE product.

Now, affiliate programmes are very nice ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programmes that are related to your blog’s theme? Easy, just go to Google and search for +”affiliate programmes”. Another slightly better way is to go to http://www.associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programmes in your niche. The two ways mentioned above are basic ways to generate profits from your blog. We’ll be discussing other great, profitable ways, so keep your eyes peeled!

More Monetizing Options

We’ve discussed about using Google Adsense programme and other merchants’ affiliate programmes to generate profits from your blog. However, we have a lot of other options ot monetize your blog, so we’re going to look into that today.

The first option we’ll be looking at is Chitika (www.chitika.com). Chitika is a very innovative contextual advertising programme because it can serve very detailed advertisements. For example, on your technological gadget blog, Chitika will show advertisements for tech gadgets such as iPods. The way they show it is in different tabs: one for “Best deals”, another for “details”, another for “reviews” and so on. This way, it is more of an informational section for your visitor rather than an advertisement, and naturally the click-through will be higher. You can apply here: https://chitika.com/application.php?type=mm

You can also be an affiliate for Amazon.com. Amazon offers a wide range of products but its predominant domain is in books. Whatever your niche is about, you can probably find a book about it on Amazon.com. Join their Associate programme here: https://associates.amazon.com/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html/

Once you join them, you can refer visitors to them and earn up to 10% commission. It’s not a lot but if you can manage to refer big volumes of visitors, Amazon is for you. This programme really shines when it comes to the ways you can refer visitors: you can use their predefined templates to pull up recent items that match a certain criteria you set, you can target your ad to show a specific item on sale or you can just simply weave your referral links into your blog posts.

Last but definitely not least, you can sell advertising space on your blog if your blog is truly popular. Just take a look at blogs like http://xiaxue.blogspot.com. That blog receives over 10,000 pageviews every day and naturally merchants will want to strike a deal with the blog’s owner to post their advertisements there. If you manage to pull in huge amounts of traffic like that blog, you can definitely get people to buy ad space on your blog for prices from $150/month upwards, depending on your blog popularity. To gauge how much pageviews and visitors you get everyday, just use the free tool available at www.statcounter.com. They have a very detailed setup guide there so I won’t go into it.

If your blog has not acquired large amount of visitors yet, you can still sell ad space on your blog on a per click or per impression basis. Just visit sites like www.adbrite.com. For a complete list of these sites, visit http://performancing.com/node/60.

Hopefully, that will help you maximize earnings and profits from your blog!

Interactions Between Blogs

As your blog’s content increases, people in your niche will definitely mention you for intelligent or interesting discussions. This is, in a sense, an initiation of an interaction. When people speak of you, you should thank them for the mention and build up the interaction! When you use a traffic tracking script such as the free www.statcounter.com, you can see where traffic comes from. If a large number of visitors come from a certain blog, you can be sure they have mentioned you in their latest post or linked to you from their sidebar or links page.

What you should do is pay them a visit, leave constructive comments on their posts and build up a conversation! As you continue doing this, you will start to gather a lot of friends in your niche. This is helpful later on when you decide to do collaborations such as interviews. In fact, when you’re out of ideas for writing on your blog, you can interview other blog owners in your niche! Human beings are curious creatures, so naturally they would like to know more about a person whose writings they read so often.

If you’re using Wordpress, Textpattern, MovableType or any other advanced blog engines, you can also post trackback links on your posts. This means you can post an article about what other people have posted! Your particular post will then appear as a link on that post you have written about. This is definitely a great way to get traffic if you post brilliant insights about a post on a very famous blog.

Since the famous blog already has a pre-existing pool of readers, this is like a shortcut to hog their visitors! The only thing you would want to observe is to keep your posts sensible and insightful, or you’ll be viewed as a spammer.

On the other hand, if you’re using Blogger, you would not be able to use trackback links. However, you can post insightful comments on other people’s blogs and subtly include a link back to your blog. You can make it seem like you’re pointing to your blog as an extra reference to the subject of discussion. Of course, this technique is not only limited to Blogger users and users of other blog engines can employ this strategy as an additional traffic source.

Finally..

Is blogging for you or even for everyone? I guess it all depends on how we define blogging. For instance, if we include social network blogging, blogging is indeed for you and for everyone, as a good percentage of Internet users operate some form of social networking blog. Currently, over 60 million people in the United States alone do that with Myspace.

So is blogging for you or everyone? If we consider commercial endeavours, it certainly is not for everyone. Only about 7% of Internet users operate blogs for commercial purposes.

The question of “is blogging for you or everyone?” also applies to entrepreneurs. Blogging can be an excellent tool for an entrepreneur – especially those who are sole proprietors looking for a good and inexpensive venue for promotion, but that doesn’t mean that everyone should necessarily do it. In some instances, a private forum will be a better means of recorded, Internet-based communication between a group of people. In other instances, a website will require less maintenance and will be a better stand-alone traffic puller, especially if the would-be blogger does not have the time to constantly update and promote a blog.

However, there definitely are a number of good reasons to blog. One of the best reasons is that it’s really easy. Building a good website can take hundreds of hours. This is not so with a blog. With a blog, you can simply open up an account with Blogger and begin posting. No coding or HTML-editing is required. You don’t even need to learn how to use WYSIWYG program – or how to upload your uploads to your website.

So is blogging for you or everyone? It isn’t for everyone, especially if we’re considering commercial blogging; some people don’t own businesses, have nothing to promote, and have no interest in starting. But there’s a good chance blogging is for you if you want to a low cost means of promoting your business. It’s cheap, comparatively easy and quick to start.

Part Two Of A Blogging Masterclass

On Page Search Engine Optimization

Now, you should have a blog full with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen niche, as opposed to a lifeless factsheet.

However, no matter how delicious your content is, if there is nobody to read it you can’t generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you must offer attractive information. Simple enough.

However, to get traffic onto your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com, to name a few more popular ones. So, to get these people on your blog, your blog needs to rank high on search result pages of these search engines. When these people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog!

The art of getting your blog or website onto high rankings on search result pages is called search engine optimization. It is a very complex and hard subject to master, but that doesn’t stop us from learning simple yet effective techniques to conquer the search results for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as “fat loss”, but I’ll teach you how to overcome that later.

For now, let’s determine the keywords that you want to optimize your site for. For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, you’d want to check in Google whether it is a very competetive keyword. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 search results. Think you can beat 29, 000, 000 sites at your first attempt? I don’t think so.

Now, let’s try to narrow down our scope. Let’s look for “technological gadgets” instead. At this time of writing, Google lists 792, 000 results. That’s more manageable, but you’d like to search for more focused keywords. However, let’s optimize your blog for “technological gadget” just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you’re optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great. You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the Wordpress blog when you’re creating it. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML!

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the

and

tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the

and

tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant.

One last bit, you should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic.

However, this is the most important bit of all. Always keep in mind that you’re writing for real life people who read your blog to obtain information, so it is very stupid to spam your blog with keywords! In fact, if you do that, the search engines will end up thinking you’re spamming and drop your ranking further down into oblivion So keep in mind! Write for humans, not search engines!

Offpage Search Engine Optimization

We’ve already optimized our blog to rank well for search results of certain keywords that we’re targetting, but here comes the sad news – it affects your ranking in only very minor ways. However, don’t skip this step as every little bit helps when you’re competing for search engine rankings!

Now, we’re moving on to offpage search engine optimization. That is, factors that are not on your blog but affect your search engine rankings very greatly. There are a lot of offpage factors, but we shall study them one by one. The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog.

As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links. For example, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like the Feds storming a crack den

Anyway, the most cost effective way of getting high quality links from authoritative sites is simply to ask for it. If your blog contains high quality content that is original and will provide valuable information to the site’s readers, chances are the webmaster(s) will link to your blog or even write about you!

Let’s talk about how we should ask these webmasters of authority to link to your blog. We’re discussing this based on the presumption that your blog is really content rich and offer high quality information to anyone in your niche or topic of discussion. The most viable option would be to send an email directly to the webmaster.

First, let’s look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that you’re targetting. In this case, let’s search for “technological gadgets”. The first few results, www.t3.co.uk and www.acarplace.com/brands/gm/gadgets.html are commercial sites, so don’t bother asking. We’re looking for community-based sites and other blogs that are more accessible to a complete newcomer like you. Seems like www.gizmodo.com would be a good option!

So, compose an email to the webmaster of www.gizmodo.com (whose email address you shall find on the site). They even have their AIM contact there, so it’s also a good choice if you use AOL Instant Messenger. Start by stating how you came across their site (i.e. “looking for gadget information”, NOT “looking for link partners!”) and how you think their site provides valuable info. Basically, try to say something really good about their site honestly.

Then, suggest that so-and-so content on your own blog will be a nice complement to their site’s content and vice versa. Put a link on your blog to their site and ask subtly if they might be able to do the same to weld a mutually beneficial relationship between the site and your blog.

Along the way, you might find people who won’t even respond to your email, so forget about them and move on. Remove the links from your blog to their site if they have not responded to your email within two weeks, which is a pretty long wait.

Keep doing this for the first 30 search results that pop up, and before long you should have quite a few good sites all linking to you. In the next article, we shall explore further the more advanced offpage factors, and ways to improve them!

Offpage Search Engine Optimization II

In the last part, we talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This time, we’re going to explore further into linking strategies, and how to determine and obtain “high quality” links. We’re also going to talk briefly about Google’s PageRank.

First, let’s examine a regular link. It’s a piece of text (or image, but we’re going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that matter are1) The address which it links to2) The text of the link3) The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let’s analyze this information one by one. First, you’d naturally want the link to link to your blog, but to which page of your blog? To an individual post or to your blog’s home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to accumulate all the links to point to your main page instead if individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Let’s say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link that says “Barbie dolls” and links to your blog. Doesn’t make much sense, right? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms “technological” or “gadget”, it will greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. Hence, it’s essential to put some thoughts when requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Google’s PageRank. It’s basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on http://www.google.com/technology/. What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google’s robots will visit the website to index it. Of course, the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google’s search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits SEO-wise.

Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different to PageRank 0) because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Google’s robots find your blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of 0 and depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blog’s PageRank will also rise eventually.

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targetted visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, enable search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank higher in search engine results.