Make Money from Blogs » Placement

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 12 – Where to add keywords

ashish — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:39:11 +0000

In the previous post (Learn about keyword density), I explained what keyword density is, what should be the amount of keyword density (including the main keywords and secondary keywords), and tools that help you measure your keyword density. In addition, there is an emphasis on making sure that you do not stuff your keywords too much into the site, since that leads to readers getting turned off and search engines putting possible penalties on the site.
In this post, I will talk about moving ahead with keywords, and defining areas of the post where you can add these keywords, as well as some rules for the same. I had talked about this in an earlier post as well (Part 5 of the series), but will provide some more details in this post about how to do more detailed optimization for ensuring a higher search engine ranking. These tips consist of where to place the keywords in terms of the structure of the post and the site. Some of these are more speculative in nature (since there is no confirmation or different search engines treat such behavior differently) and some of these are sure fire tips that work to improve your search engine ranking.
(Warning: None of these will do magic! Search engine ranking improvements through such optimization can take weeks or months to achieve, and you need to be patient)
- Try to ensure that the keywords are not too tightly bunched in one section of the page, although there are conflicting views on whether it makes some benefit to slightly increase the keyword density in the top section of the post content
- Keywords in anchor text. This may not be clear to some people, so consider this. You have got an option to get a link to your page from some other site, and if it is a well regarded site, then your site can benefit. However, if you do get an option, make sure that the link is something like (camera phone reviews) rather than (click here). Getting keywords in an anchor text can do a lot of good to search engines belief in you as a credible source
- Page Title. Put keywords in your page title, with the keyword appearing earlier in the title
- Images. If there are images / video on the page, then add the keywords as part of the alt/title tags of the image, and also as part of the text that forms the description of the image / video
- In the URL. Most blogging platforms give you a way to modify the URL that will be formed, and you should ensure that you have keywords as part of the URL. Typically, the title of the post is used as the URL, but consider having one set of keywords in the title, and another set of keywords in the URL
- Domain name. It is difficult to get domain names that have sought after keywords, since they are all gone. Try different variations of the keyword as part of the domain name until you get it right. You may have to make some compromises in this process.
- Title of the blog. In the head section of the blog code, you can modify the title of the blog. Be sure to include keywords as part of the blog title.
- Headings. Headings are a good way to segregate your blog into sections, and search engines also like it if you add keywords in your headings.

And of course, if you know more such tips or believe that some of them need to be modified, please leave a comment.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 8

ashish — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 04:49:41 +0000

In the previous article (Optimizing images for SEO), I talked about how to ensure that you are getting the required boost from your images as part of Search Engine Optimization.
This post will start talking at a preliminary level, since we are going to start talking about an important part of the overall SEO gameplan; I will start explaining today about what keywords are, and how they are important for the purpose of Search Engine Optimization. Learning about keywords as a part of SEO is extremely important if you want to boost your blogs rankings in the top search engines, and you need the higher ranking to drive more traffic to your site, which in turn should generate more revenue to you. If you have done any kind of website optimization, talked to a SEO consultant, or read articles on this, all of them will jump out and shout ‘keyword’ to you.
So, what are keywords / key phrases ? Keywords or phrases are those single words or word phrases that are contained in your page, in the content, and that help in driving search engines to your site. They are supposed to represent what users typically search for, and if you are ranked highly by search engines for those tags, then there is a much better chance that when users search for those phrases, they will find your site. So, for example, if you have a site on selling cameras, then you would really want your site to be ranked high when users search for ‘digital camera’, ‘low priced camera’, ‘camera’, ‘SLR’, ‘Canon camera’ and so on. If you are ranked high, then more visitors, and hence more money.
Earlier, people would use a meta-tag (a tag in the header portion of the HTML page) to add such keywords, but because of people trying to exploit the system by adding irrelevant information in the meta-tags or by stuffing the meta-tags, it is believed that search engines have learned to ignore meta-tags (and in the worst case, penalize any site that tries such tactics); what they believe is that if such tags are included in the text of the contents of the page, then they are counted. So why do people not make pages entire in this format “canon digital camera low price SLR camera flash digital”, and so on. After all, this content adds a lot more keywords. Well, such a text would quickly turn off readers, and now search engines have got smarter, and they expect that such keywords will only form a small percentage of the overall text, else the text would not be proper content. Further, each search engine tends to have its own algorithm of what to use and what not to use.
As a starter (and future posts will provide more advanced technologies related to finding keywords which are of higher value, or used more), start to visualize as to which are the keywords that you would use were you searching like your customers, ask other people around you, look at forums, and then you will get an idea as to which are the keywords that you need in your content.
Next post looks at this topic in more detail ..

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Promoting your photo blog – Unique content helps, but need to put in more effort

ashish — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:22:08 +0000

How do you promote your photo blog ? Well, everybody will tell you that you need to have content (good, original content that interests your readers), and that is true. There is nothing to beat content. However, just having content is not enough. You need to do additional stuff if you want your blog to be seen by people, your photos admired, and if you have ads or do some affiliate work, then you need to take effort to get your photo blog make some money for you. Here are some of the tips that could help you in this regard:
1. Get good content that interests your readers. These should be photos that drive people to come again, or to forward to friends and family. Make sure your photos are technically sound, and free of major defects.
2. See whether the photos you post can meet a certain niche. For example, I was looking at a blog that was posting only macro photos of insects, another was posting photos of a technique where the camera is thrown in the air while the shutter is open (producing some very interesting photos). Explore whether your interests can form a niche.
3. Make sure that there is some text next to your photos, and the ‘alt’ tag on your photos are always filled out. Search engines cannot read a photo in terms of figuring out what the content of a photo is, and the text is what the search engines read.
4. Use Google Webmasters (link) to verify your site, and create a Sitemap (link) so that Google Search gets updated when you post a new photo. This process can be very useful for generating more traffic to your site from Google Search.
5. A warning: The Google Adsense Program policies prohibit anybody from putting ads to the left or right of a photo, since this could result in users being mislead about the ads being a explanation of the photo. Be careful to avoid this, and instead post your ads in such a manner that Google would not consider that misleading.
6. Post your Photo Blog to photo directories, major search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Altavista, and to directories such as Dmoz. Look for Blogrings that could help in promoting your site, and sending more traffic to you.
7. Use Social Networking Plugins such as Posting to Facebook, Twitter, etc, to give your users a chance to promote your photos if they like such photos. However, be careful, since if you go overboard, users are likely to go overboard. The best way is to provide such tools right after a post, and not flood the whole page with such options.
8. Make sure your users are able to get access to feeds (RSS as well as email) so that they have the option of receiving regular updates from you.
9. Review your site traffic using your site tracking meters as well as specialist tools such as Google Analytics to analyze your traffic. For example, if you find that a major percentage of your users are finding you based on one particular search, you might want to post more in that area.
10. If you want to sell stuff from your site or have joined with Affiliate Programs, then look for relevant stuff to sell. So, if you photos are mostly travel, then put ads for travel related stuff such as holiday packages, maps, travel gears, offers, etc.

What you should not do when trying to promote your blog

ashish — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:49:40 +0000

When you start writing a blog, there are several steps you would want to take to ensure that your blog gets popular soon, and that more people visit your blog over a period of time. You can search the internet, and find a number of ways that promise to ensure that your blog / site will get more popular. And the art of increasing the popularity of a site is not a specific art with known steps, it is not that you take these steps, and voila, your blog will get more popular. Without getting into too much detail, the most important steps that a person can take to improve the popularity of their blogs are to ensure that you have regular periodic updates of unique content that is likely to be interesting to the desired set of users, and that enough of these users (and other sites) feel that linking to your site would be in the interest of their readers.
Now, there are a number of steps that have been tried in the past to ‘game’ search engines to get them to increase your blog in their search rankings, and at the same time, there is ongoing effort by the search engines to see through these attempts to game their search engine rankings, and at some point, they have started penalizing people who try to artificially inflate their search engine rankings (such as stuffing meta-data tags all over the page, adding additional content with the same color as the page background, buying links from external sites, and so on). If you were thinking of going overboard with such efforts, do not try them anymore. Also on the list of things not to try are:
- Leave comments on other people’s blogs in order to try and get some of that Page Rank onto you (these are typically useless comments such as ‘Good Post’, ‘I agree’, and so on). These are 2 reasons why this really does not work. Unless your comment is meaningful, people typically ignore such comments (and the blog owner may delete such a comment); further search engines and popular blogging software have come up with a mechanism such as a ‘nofollow’ tag that tells search engines not to follow such tags (as a result, the higher Page Rank of that blog does not benefit you in any way).
- There are so many attractively packaged software that promise nothing more than being able to auto-submit your page to so many search engines. It is very tempting to just use such a software. But you need not do so, since most modern search engines will soon find your site. It is much more beneficial to instead add your site to Google’s Webmaster tools (search for Google Webmaster) and if already have another site with some sort of Page Rank, put a link to your new site on this older site, and it will get discovered faster.
- Giving people a way to add your post to social engines and others such as Digg, etc. You must have seen sites such as this, with an entire line given over to a number of icons allowing visitors to auto-post your post to many of these sites. You should start doing this only when you have a number of visitors to your site, otherwise it adds no value to your site, and may put off some people. If you do want to do this, then go in for a small selected list and stick to those.

Adsense success stories as well as the virtue of patience

ashish — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:34:30 +0000

When you are struggling along with viewership and click rates not being upto the level you expect, it can be very frustrating. You criticize Google for not getting your pages into the search results to a level where the traffic to your site increases manifold, where the Adsene revenue that you get means that you have a nice alternative to whatever you are currently making, and at some point will be enough that you can leave your current job and jump into the world of blogging full scale.
Well, you would love to do all that, but it has been many days / weeks / months now, but the jump is not happening at the speed at which you want it, and you are losing your patience. Well, there are several things that you can do at this point of time without giving up:
- Have patience. To build up a committed viewership, as well as to advance higher into the Google search results takes time and effort. Unless you are writing on a niche area that has high user interest, there would be many others who are doing the same thing. You need to keep at it, writing high quality stuff that will bring more readers.
- Look for optimizations that you can do with your site. There are many improvements that are possible for existing websites dealing with layout, templates, colors, etc. Make sure that you search for optimization tips for these areas and implement such tips
- Look for Adsense optimization. There are a huge number of resources available through Google Search that provide tips for Adsense optimization. You might find that some simple tweaks can make a huge amount of change to your click ratio.

And of course, you should read the Adsense page for people who have become successful and are sharing their tips and techniques on what to do to become successful with Adsense (link for article). Some of the successful publishers are:
- Hometips
- Univision
- Teachnology.com
- AutomotiveForums.com
- Apartmentratings.com
- Swapalease.com
- TestMagic.com
- PVRBlog.com
- Medical-Coding.net
- SeatGuru.com