Stop by http://Successfool.tv every Thursday night at 7pm PST or go watch the previous shows which have been recorded.

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Looking forward to seeing you there…

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But I just found out about a REALLY cool SEO Contest that Ryan over at SEONoobs.com is putting on for 30 days.  You see the contest involves the Key Phrase  “Yicrosoft Directory.”  The object of this contest is to rank highest after the 30 days for Yicrosoft Directory.

I’m assuming that because of Microsoft is bidding on Yahoo they came up with this crazy keyphrase.  Maybe Ryan has some insider information about this merger?  He does offer some great SEO Help though so you wanna definitely check him out!  We’ll have to wait and see.
Stay Tuned Folks and I’ll see you at the the TOP!

Alejandro

Ps.  Yicrosoft Directory

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One of the least understood aspects of blogging is RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication (amongst others) and is a way for others to receive your content without having to visit your blog. There are a number of ways people use RSS feeds, and the two most common ones are:

i.    As a source of content for their own website and blogs. If they find your content useful they can take your RSS feed and turn it into content on their on website or blog. This is known as syndication.

ii.    Instead of visiting your blog each time you make a post, they can plug your RSS feed into a feed reader. They will be alerted to your new posts and can then read your posts on the feed reader, for example the email client Mozilla Thunderbird allows users to subscribe to RSS feeds.

In either case you have to decide whether to provide a full feed (i.e. the whole post appears in the RSS feed) or a partial feed (i.e. only excerpts of the post are included in the RSS feed) in which case people who use your feeds will have to visit your blog to read the whole post. By default, WordPress automatically creates two RSS feeds - one for new posts and one for new comments.

The default WordPress RSS feeds are very basic. An effective way to enhance and manage your RSS feeds is to join FeedBurner, which has these main advantages:

i.    Feedburner will automatically translate your feed into a format (RSS or Atom) that is compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application.

ii.    Feedburner gives you the option to add the rel=”noindex” element to your feeds so the search engines will not index your feed. This is important because duplicate content filters are indiscriminate and they could filter out your main blog content in favor of your RSS feed. By adding the “noindex” element, you ensure that only your blog content is indexed.

iii.    Feedburner has a “chicklet creator” which is simply a system for creating custom icons and the relevant html code from the popular web aggregators to help your readers easily subscribe to your feed.

To get the full benefits of joining Feedburner does mean the html code in your blog theme needs to be modified. The Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin from Steve Smith will do it for you. It works by forwarding all your feed traffic to FeedBurner.

Allowing others to subscribe to your RSS feeds is not the whole story… You can also monetize your feeds. Considering most RSS subscribers won’t visit your blog, and one of the main reasons behind blogging is to make money, it makes sense to monetize your feeds.

Feedburner has such a system, but it is only available to RSS feeds which receive a lot of subscribers. On the other hand, the Feedvertising plugin is free and allows you to run text link ads in your RSS feeds. The ads can come from the plugin supplier (Text-Link_ads.com), your own products, or your affiliate links.

If you decide to go with advertising in your RSS feeds, keep your ads relevant to the content in the feed, and be aware that you will lose some feed subscribers. There are people in this world who simply hate the idea that you are making money out of the free content you are providing…

Your Success - My Passion

Alejandro Reyes
skype:  whoisalejandro
yahoo:  whoisalejandro

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My friend Laura Martin who is currently a finalist on Joel Comm’s “Next Internet Millionaire” has been getting some publicity all over the net but I don’t think there’s been a much more exiting article then the one I just read, see for youself:

Britney’s ex-bodyguard may testify about ‘drug use,’ lawyer says; Austinite seizes wriggly opportunity

It’s an interesting article because Britney and Laura have done have something in common. Britney embarrased herself at the MTV VMA’s last week which could potentially end her career and Laura has embarrassed herself on the Next Internet Millionaire and her career is about to explode!!

As Britney would say it…”It’s Laura Bleep.”

Your Success - My Passion,

Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro

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Sarah and I are extremely excited to announce that we’re expecting our first child come April of 08.  We are super stoked and I can’t wait to be a daddy.

The title of this post is “What’s your WHY?”  I titled it that because I think it’s imperative that you know YOUR why?  Your why is your goal or your purpose, your end in mind.  I’m a firm believer in knowing what you want out of life first, then work backwards.  Most people live day to day and have no direction or vision of what they truly want out of life.  I don’t know what I would be doing if I didn’t have such a passion for why I do what I do.

A lot of my friends and family have always asked me, why don’t you get a “real” job or why do you work from home.  I’ve heard this for the past 10 years and I think this past week some have actually realized why I’ve decided to take the path of an Entrepreneur.

One of my goals over the last 10 years was to be in a position financially with my businesses to be able to bring my wife home to raise my kids (keep in mind I have only been married 2 years), unless she absolutely wanted to go back to work after having a baby.

You see, I was consciously thinking about this years ago.  I had a vision and I was passionate about that vision.  Is this for everyone; maybe, maybe not.  I just know that I wanted to be in a position to give my wife that option when it came around.  I wanted her to have the choice to work, not the other way around and have “no choice” but to work.

That’s what entrepreneurship does, it gives you choices in life.  Choices to have what you really want out of life, what you’re passionate about.

So my reason WHY has a totally new dynamic to it.  Over the next 9 months I need to take both my businesses to the next level.  My goal over the next 9 months is to help 15 NEW people get into a FREE  2008 Black BMW with one of the companies that I’m a part of.  If you’re interested let me know.

How about YOU?  What’s your WHY?  Are you doing what you truly are passionate about?  Are you working for yourself and making YOUR dreams come true or do you go to work just to make someone else’s dreams come true?

These are questions you have to be asking yourself on a frequent basis.  You owe it to yourself to at least think about it.

This blog was created for YOU.  It was created to give you ideas on how to become an Entrepreneur.  If you ever have any questions about entrepreneurship or business ideas, don’t hesitate to ask me.

My WHY just got a lot bigger - I’m excited, nervous, passionate, anxious, and focused.

Your Success - My Passion

Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
skype:  whoisalejandro

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The effects of social bookmarking are much the same as word of mouth advertising. People generally only bookmark webpages or blog posts that interest them, but they also classify the pages by using tags. Generally these are only single word tags and are used in a simple search system to display matches ranked by popularity. The popularity of a webpage or blog post is determined by the number of times it has been bookmarked by other users.

Tags are simply a way of categorizing bookmarked pages. For example a blog post on increasing website traffic could be tagged with these tags:

- website
- traffic

Social proof plays a big part in bringing traffic to your blog from social bookmarking websites. The more one of your blog posts has been bookmarked, the more people will feel compelled to visit your blog to see what they are missing out on.
Some social bookmarking services like Digg can result in a huge increase in traffic if your post becomes popular and makes it into the homepage of its category, or makes it into the Top 10. Unfortunately Digg traffic is short lived and is often not very targeted, but you will get some regular readers from the traffic.

With this in mind, you have to make it easy for people to bookmark your blog posts. Fortunately social bookmarking services will supply you with a small coded button to place on your blog which makes it easy for visitors to bookmark your posts.

Some of the most popular social bookmarking services are:

del.icio.us
furl
Technorati
Spurl
Simpy
Scuttle
BackFlip
BuddyMarks
blinkbits
BlinkList
Digg
Netscape (probably my favorite)

If you don’t want to manually add a list of social bookmarking buttons, there is a plugin called Sociable by Peter Harkins which appends links to social bookmarking services so your readers can bookmark your blog’s posts.

If you are comfortable modifying php code, there is a good article by Andy Beard for modifying the Sociable plugin to add rel=”nofollow” to these links so your pages don’t pass any page rank to the social bookmarking services. You can read the article here.

A word of warning - people who regularly use social bookmarking services won’t be fooled by poor poorly written posts, over optimized posts or posts created from other people’s content. Make sure your posts contain useful well written content and you will get bookmarks and a corresponding increase in traffic.

One further point to bear in mind is many social bookmarking services will only accept bookmarks from posts on certain topics. The point being not to add links to every single social bookmarking service you can find. Choose a handful which best suit your blog, get to know the social bookmarking service fully and only link to the few you have chosen.

Your Success - My Passion,

Alejandro Reyes
skype:  whoisalejandro
yahoo:  whoisalejandro

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EzineArticles.com is an article directory which is viewed by the search engines as an authority website, and articles which target up 10,000 competing pages will normally rank very high in the search results, especially on Google.

You can use this to your advantage…

Each of the major blog posts you write should target a keyword phrase which receives some traffic, but has little competition. You can double up on the traffic by re-writing the blog post and then submitting it to EzineArticles.com. For low to medium competition keywords your articles could rank very high in the search results.

This means you could quite conceivably get your blog post and the article in the top 10 results. With two pages instead of only one listed you get a second change to draw more visitors to your blog.

At the bottom of your article submitted to EzineArticles, you are allowed to place a short paragraph which contains a link back to your blog (known as a resource box). If your article is informative and your resource box contains a well written link back to your blog, the reader may well click the link to read more.

If you wrote an article targeting the keyword phrase “increase website traffic”, you could use the following resource box:

If you want to read more about how to increase website traffic, click over to Ruby Rubble’s blog at http://Rubys-Blog.com.

The keyword phrase “increase website traffic” would be a hyperlink so the code you would use in your resource box is:

If you want to read more about how to <a href=”http://rubys-blog.com”>
increase website traffic, click over to Ruby Rubble’s blog at http://Rubys-blog.com

By re-writing blog posts which target very low competition keywords into articles targeting higher competition keywords you could end up with your article and your post ranking highly in the search engines for different keywords, and while your blog is still fairly new you could more than double the traffic you would receive from just the post on its own.

Until tomorrow folks,

Alejandro Reyes
skype:  whoisalejandro

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Tagging is simply a method of organizing your posts under certain key words. Think of it as a filing system where blog posts are filed under the tags for easy retrieval. Since Technorati was one of the first services, their method of creating tags is the one most commonly used.

To create a tag you add the key word (or words) for your tag in a special link which has the following structure:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/XXXX” rel=”tag”>XXXX</a>

Where XXXX is your tag name. If the tag is made up of more than one word, the words need to be separated with “+”, for example:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/increase+website+traffic” rel=”tag”>Increase Website Traffic</a>

You can use more than one tag and they are generally placed at the bottom of each post. Just make sure you are using tags which:

i) Are relevant to your post
ii) Have some activity at Technorati (i.e. people are actually searching for the tag)

You can either add tags to your posts manually by separating each tag link with a comma or you can use a plugin to assist you. One of the best plugins to manage your tags is the Ultimate Tag Warrior which was discussed in the second chapter. Ultimate Tag Warrior saves the tags you add to your posts and makes them available for inclusion into future posts by simply clicking the relevant tag in the saved tag list.

Pinging is the name given to the process of informing various blog search engines and directories that the content on your blog has been updated. In WordPress there is a place to add the ping service URL’s in the control panel, found by navigating to “Options / Writing” and adding them to the “Update Services” text box.

In the appendix there is a list of these services, but be warned… Many ping multiple services which could well already be on the list under another ping service. This means you will be pinging the same service more than once and your blog could be labeled a spam blog (also referred to as a splog). A safer option could be to use Autopinger as discussed in the sixth chapter.

To your Success,

Alejandro Reyes
skype:  whoisalejandro

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Start by claiming your blog, then write a brief description and add a few Tags relevant to the theme of your blog. These tags are important because they are used by people looking for information using the Technorati search facility (the next chapter explains the concept of tagging and pinging).

Searches using Technorati can be made on all blogs or only those you have saved to your favorites. When conducting a search you can search in:

- Blog posts
- Tags
- The entire blog directory

And you can further refine your search by limiting results to blogs with:

- Any authority
- A little authority
- Some authority
- A lot of authority

Blogs are ranked in authority as follows:

- The Low Authority Group (3-9 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
- The Middle Authority Group (10-99 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
- The High Authority Group (100-499 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
- The Very High Authority Group (500 or more blogs linking in the last 6 months)

Your success with Technorati lies with accurate relevant tagging and building your authority. So you need to conduct a little research and find all the tags currently used in Technorati which accurately describe the overall theme of your blog.

Once you have found a list of related tags you can add them to your tag list or whatever tagging plugin you are using. When you write a post only select the tags that most accurately describe the content of your article. Don’t add tags to your posts thinking that certain tags will get you the most traffic. There are real people using Technorati who are looking for relevant content. By using the most accurate tags for people to find your posts, they will appreciate the rest of the content on your blog all the more.

Once your post has been pinged, it will be placed within the Technorati system so people searching for those tags can find your post. Unfortunately with popular tags, your post will be rapidly moved down the listing by posts from the latest pings received from other blogs (posts are placed at the top of the list when they arrive and are moved down by subsequent posts).

Do not repeatedly ping your post in the hope of regaining the top spot in the listing. Multiple pings for the same post will get your blog labeled as spam and it could be banned.

By regularly submitting quality posts to Technorati through the ping process you will begin to build a network of fellow bloggers who link through to your blog (either in their posts or in their blogroll). Technorati takes the number of these links into account when ranking your blog. The more links your blog gets, the higher its authority becomes and the more exposure your blog will receive on Technorati.

To YOUR Success,

Alejandro Reyes
skype:  whoisalejandro
yahoo:  whoisalejandro

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There is one basic fact of life when it comes to blogging; your blog is going to receive spam in one form or another, and most likely all forms!

The most prolific form is comment spam. Experienced spammers use highly advance programs (known as spam engines) to leave comments on thousands of blogs which contain links to the product they are promoting - much the same as those spam emails you receive daily.

They have evolved to the point where they can read the verification images displayed by some anti-comment spam plugins. Some can read and interpret javascript code, and renaming your form variables in the comment files is not a worthwhile solution. They can still find the necessary variables by reading and interpreting the comment form code.

The Askimet plugin which comes with WordPress is pretty effective at stopping spam comments appearing on your blog, but it places them in a moderation queue so you still have to review them and manually delete them. Unfortunately it often places innocent comments in the moderation queue, so you have to check regularly.

To use the Askimet plugin you will have to sign up for a WordPress.com account in order to receive an API key for use with the plugin. When you enter your details into the sign up form, make sure you use the “Just a username, please” option. Once you have succesfully opend a WordPress account, they will send your API key via email.

There is another option for reducing blog spam offered by the plugin called HashCash from Elliot Black which slows down advanced spam engines and virtually eliminates most automated spam comments from getting near your blog in the first place. The advantage of this is you don’t get spam held in a moderation queue because the spam is stopped before plugins like Askimet can do their job of filtering it out.

It works by picking a random large number every four hours. Whenever somebody visits your posts, a javascript is called which first decrypts itself, then executes itself again to retrieve a secret value saved in a .htaccess protected folder, which it then sets in the form. If a comment does not have this value, it is rejected. If a comment is rejected more than four times, the user is blocked for a specified period of time.

It is important to note that this will not stop a spam comment left by a visitor to your blog, so the best option is to use HashCash in conjunction with plugins like Askimet. This way you only have a few comments to moderate instead of hundreds or thousands.

Most spammers who leave trackback spam will never place a link to your blog on theirs. There is a plugin called Simple Trackback Validation by Michael Woehrer which reduces spam trackbacks by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback (in the comment on your post) and checking if the page contains a link to your blog: if not, the trackback is placed in a moderation queue and is not published on your blog.

Unfortunately there is no 100% reliable automated method of accurately identifying, trapping and deleting spam. Normal comments will be trapped (known as false positives) and you will have to review your moderation queue on a regular basis, but by using plugins you can dramatically reduce your moderation workload.

Happy Blogging and have a great weekend!

Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
skype: whoisalejandro

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At some point you will get into a situation where the sheer volume of comments becomes too much to handle on your own. You will spend too much time answering comments and not enough time writing posts.

The problem is not just the replies to the posts you have just published; the problem is compounded by visitors who find your old posts in the search engine listings. You will have to reply to comments on posts you published a long time ago. If your blog receives thousands of visits daily, many of those visitors will want to leave some sort of comment.

This leaves you with two options to consider:

1) Don’t accept comments

While this might effectively solve the problem outright, your new blog is not going to grow very quickly.
If you are creating an RSS fed blog which will run with little or no intervention on your part, then you don’t want to accept comments. Nothing will ruin your blog’s reputation quicker than unanswered comments on each post…

2) Stop accepting comments to posts after a certain time period has elapsed

Use the Comment Timeout plugin by James McKay which will allow you to automatically close comments on posts after a predetermined period of time. It also has an option which allows you to keep comments open for longer on older posts if recent comments have been left.

All settings are made through the “Options / Comment Timeout” page of your WordPress control panel.
This plugin will allow you to stop comments being accepted by setting the time period to zero.

Until tomorrow folks,

Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455

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1) Go and read the latest posts on all the blogs you frequently visit. If you find an interesting post, write a few brief comments on the post and include the URL to the original post. Once you get into the habit of writing good articles, other bloggers will do the same for you.

2) Go to EzineArticles.com and search for articles related to your blog. Read as many as you can and write down any interesting points you could include in an article. Never copy text directly from any of the articles, just jot down the main points in your own words so you can expand them in your own article.

3) Go through the comments left on your own blog (or other related blogs) and jot down the main points of the questions being asked. Your answers will be the basis of an article.

4) Visit forums related to the theme of your blog and find questions being asked by members. Make a note of the questions and replies to these questions and write your own article based on the replies.

5) Once your blog starts receiving a good amount of traffic use the plugin by Survey Gizmo to employ surveys asking your readers which topics they would like to receive more information on. You can write articles based on the results.

6) Go to any of the social bookmarking websites and find popular bookmarks for sites with a similar theme to your blog. Make a note of the most popular topics and then visit the bookmarked pages. Take notes on the points covered in the articles on the various pages and use them as the basis for your own articles.

7) Go though your own blog posts, especially the more popular ones and figure out whether you have missed anything. Make a note of the missing points and write an article covering them. Remember to add a link to your original post in the new article.

Finally, when all else fails, “how to” articles and blog posts are some of the most sought after, linked to, and bookmarked content online. Pick an important process related to your blog’s theme and explain how to do it…

To Your Success,

Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro

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Posting regularly is necessary to keep your readers and the search engines interested in your blog. This becomes a bit of a challenge if you decide to go on holiday. The answer is to use one of the great features of WordPress, which is the option to save your posts and publish them at a date and time you specify.

In the “Post Timestamp” drop down box on the right hand side of the “Write” page, you will see a check box that says “Edit Timestamp” with a drop down box for the month above text boxes for the date and time. You can change these to the date and time you want your post to be published. You must check the “Edit Timestamp” check box in order for the change to take place. Forget the check box and when you click “Publish”, your post will be published instantly.

There is another aspect of blogging which makes this WordPress feature useful, and that is you will find inspiration for writing posts comes in fits and starts… One day you will get the urge to write a number of posts, while on other days you will draw a complete blank when you site down to write. When you do get the urge to write, create a number of posts and schedule them to be published over the next few days or weeks.

If you have opted to use the “Update Services” feature of WordPress and have entered a list of ping services into the WordPress “Options / Writing” page, the post will be pinged as soon as you save it. If you are saving a lot of posts they will all be pinged as soon as you save them and might be construed as spamming by the update services. The answer is to use a service or plugin which only pings the update services when your posts are actually published. Here are two such options:

1.    The No Ping Wait plugin has been used for some time by bloggers, but with recent versions of WordPress some bloggers have reporting that saved posts are no longer being pinged when they are published. The PingFix plugin by Jan Piotrowski addresses this issue and only pings update services when your posts are published.

2.    The other option available to you is to use the Autopinger service which checks your blog every thirty minutes or so and will only ping the blog services when a new post is published on your blog. If you decide to use this service, make sure you delete all the URL’s in the update services option in your WordPress admin panel.

To your Success,

Alejandro Reyes
skype:  whoisalejandro
yahoo:  whoisalejandro

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It is fairly easy to get visitors to your blog from a link on another website or a search engine listing, but it’s just as easy to lose your new visitor when they find it difficult to find related information on your blog. The default WordPress installation is not visitor friendly, and the historical archives are a complete waste of time… Offer your visitors an easy way to find similar posts to the one they are currently reading, and don’t make it difficult to find other information.

In the previous chapter we discussed the concept of linking related posts together and not leaving them isolated. Here are a few more ideas:

1) Display a site search utility

Internet users are becoming savvier and many people are comfortable using a blog search facility if you make one available. WordPress comes with a fairly simple search facility which most blog themes will incorporate.

When you first start your blog the WordPress search facility will be quite adequate, but as your number of posts increases you will need to enhance your WordPress blog search results by using the Search Reloaded Plugin by SemioLogic which uses an advanced search algorithm.

2) Display a list of related posts

If your reader reads your entire blog post, there’s a very good chance they will want more information, so offer them a list of related posts at the end of each blog post. You can accomplish this by using the modified Related Posts plugin from Peter Bowyer. He has enhanced the original plugin by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu because the original plugin did not always display decent results. Additionally, using the keyword option to identify related posts meant having to edit all previous posts.

The modified plugin takes the post content, and calculates word frequency using weightings for different parts of the post (eg URL, title, content). It then matches these against your WordPress database, and returns results which are more relevant.

The downside of this plugin is that it is not supported, but it does work with WorPress 2.1

The three advantages of this plugin are:

- It is simple to install.
- It will work correctly with existing posts.
- It gave the most relevant results of all the plugins I tried.

3) Display a list of the most read posts

In your blog side bar you could list a number of your most popular posts. If people find a post interesting it makes sense improve the post’s exposure and make it available to every visitor to your blog.

The bsuite plugin by Casey Bisson will display (among other things) a predetermined number of popular posts based on the number of times it has been read.

4) Display a list of recent posts

Perhaps not as important as the previous three points, but if your blog is a news type blog then the most recent posts will be current news and of interest to your readers. The easiest way to display recent posts is to use the Fuzzy Recent Posts plugin from Semiologic.

Stay tuned tomorrow as I  will be talking about “going away and still leaving posts.”

To YOUR Success,

Alejandro Reyes
skype:  whoisalejandro

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1) The Effect of posting regularity

During my research into effective blog posting, one point came up time and time again:

As soon as bloggers reduced their posting frequency or stopped posting altogether their website traffic began to drop off, and their search engine rankings began to slide.

On the opposite side of the coin, posting too many times in one day seemed to have the same effect…

The general consensus for effective posting seemed to be one of consistency; of creating a blogging schedule and sticking to it. For example, one or two posts per week of at least 200 words, and one or two posts of 500 words or more.

The shorter posts could be a quick note referencing an interesting article or blog post you have found, while the longer posts could be an explanation of some particular procedure or a review of a product or service. The longer posts are the ones to concentrate your search engine optimization efforts on as they are more likely to be indexed and ranked.

2) Reveal Some of Your Personality

People visit blogs regularly because they form an affinity with the blogger. They either agree or disagree with the blogger, but if they respect the blogger’s opinions, they keep coming back for more.

Being too personable has the opposite affect. People are not interested in your personal life, or your possessions. They are interested in your opinions and advice. This means taking a stand on issues and products and not bragging about your latest Porche or complaining about your latest misfortune!

If you like, or don’t like something say so, but explain your reasons. Your personality will show through as regular readers begin to understand your likes and dislikes. This is when some readers will begin to form an affinity with you. Others will decide they don’t like you and stop visiting your blog… You will get the odd one who sticks around to ruffle your feathers, much like a forum troll - just delete their comments and hope they get the message.

3) Don’t Leave Your Posts Isolated

Internal linking plays an important role in search engine optimization. When you write a post link it to other related posts. Make sure you use the main keyword phrase of the post you are linking to in the hyperlink.

For example if you were writing a post about “green widgets” and had previously written a post about “blue widgets” you could reference your “blue widgets” post by creating a link to it, the html code of your link would look like this:

<a href=”http://www.your-blog.com/widgets/blue-widgets.php”>blue widgets</a>

When you are write a post using WordPress simply highlight the text you want included in the hyperlink, click the “Insert/Edit Link” button and a popup is displayed where you can enter the link URL (http://www.your-blog.com/widgets/blue-widgets.php in the example) and click the insert button.

This serves two purposes:

i. It creates a back link to the blue widgets post giving your search engine optimization for that post a slight boost.

ii. It gives your reader a link to another related article which they will probably go and read, and so you get an extra opportunity to impress your reader and ultimately expose them to your advertisements.

Your primary goal in improving readership and rankings is to keep your readers happy. Keeping the search engines happy is secondary. You might employ every SEO trick in the book, but once your readers lose interest they will stop visiting your blog. This means you stop getting return traffic, new back links and bookmarks. The search engines will soon notice this reduced activity and your rankings will begin to slide.

Hope you find this post to be helpful to your blogging efforts.

Tomorrow we’ll be discussing “How to keep your readers happy…”

Until then!

Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
yahoo: whoisalejandro
skype: whoisalejandro

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Your primary aim for maintaining a blog is to make money, and for the long term success of your blog you need to focus on getting as many high ranking posts in the search engines as possible.

To start out your blog will not have enough backlinks or page rank to help drive your posts into top ranking positions. The trick is to target keyword phrases which have little competition in the search engines. One major drawback is these keywords is they are unlikely to attract much traffic, and so you have to concentrate on writing posts which target many different keyword phrases.

The single most important search engine optimization tip to employ when you are writing a blog post is to select a primary keyword phrase and then include as many related words and phrases as possible.

Keyword density is not something you should concentrate on. Rather than stuffing your post with your primary keyword phrase, use words which have the same meaning (known as synonyms) and add related phrases (or secondary keyword phrases). The days of creating one blog post for each keyword phrase are long gone.

You can use the WordTracker free trial to find keywords which you have researched (i.e. they are searched for regularly, but have little competition). Once you have identitfied suitable keywords, use the Google Keyword tool to find related phrases which Google associates with your main keywords. Enter your main keyword into the “Keyword Variations” text box. Make sure the “Use synonyms” check box is checked and click “Get More Keywords”.

The Google Keywords tool will then return a list of keywords it thinks are related to your main keyword. Save these in either a text format or as a .csv file which you can open using a spreadsheet (e.g. MS Excel). Go through each keyword phrase and delete those that have no relevence to the blog post you intend to write.

When you write your post include as many of these related keywords as you can, but make sure your post has a logical flow to it and your included phrases makes sense. You should write for your readers first - make your post content informative and easy to read.

Include your primary keyword phrase in your post title, but make sure the post content closely matches your chosen title. You should also include your primary keyword phrase once or twice in the post content, and include the related phrases you have identified, for example if your primary keyword phrase is “increase website traffic” and the Google Keywords tool returned these related phrases:

-improve website ranking
-top website traffic
-get website traffic
-targeted website traffic
-guaranteed website traffic
-your website traffic

Here is how you could use them in your post title:

Dramatically Increase Website Traffic and Improve Website Ranking with These Top Website Traffic Tips

In your post you would refer to all the keyword phrases once or twice and back them up with even more similar or related phrases, for example: website traffic -> website hits -> unique hits -> site traffic. Don’t keep repeating the same phrase over and over in your post content.

If you have written other posts which targeted some of the related secondary phrases, link to them using the secondary keyword phrase as the link text. Linking to similarly themed posts benefits your readers because they can find more information, but it also gives your posts a slight SEO boost from the internal “in context” linking.

One very important point to remember is 30% to 40% of all search engine queries are one time long tail search phrases which the search engines do not have any matching webpages to display. The actual results displayed will be the webpages which the search engines decide are the closest match. When writing your posts take this into account and create as many permutations as you can of the keyword phrases you are targeting. For example (this is a real example from one of my niche websites):

- facts about whether a plant grows faster inside or outside
- information on a plants growth rate inside and outside
- growing plants inside vs. outside
- do plants grow faster indoors or outdoors

Pay attention to your post slug as WordPress uses this to create a file name for your post. Make sure the primary keyword phrase is near the beginning of the slug. By default, WordPress uses the post title as the post slug, but it cleans it up by removing apostrophes, quote marks, and other characters.

For example, using the title in the “increase website traffic” example, WordPress would automatically name the post slug:

dramatically-increase-website-traffic-and-improve-website-ranking-with-these
-top-website-traffic-tips

To write a new post slug, simply rewrite it with dashes between each word, for example:
incease-website-traffic-improve-ranking-top-promotion-tips

N.B. - Make sure you change your post slug BEFORE you publish the post, and don’t include non essential words like a, the, but, my, with etc. Changing your post slug after you have published it can cause problems with the posts permalinks and result in a 404 File Not Found error…

I hope these past few days are giving you some help with your optimizing your Wordpress Blog.

Until Tomorrow,

Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
yahoo:  whoisalejandro
skype:  whoisalejandro

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1) Make a decision - to use, or not to use, the www. prefix in your blog URL’s…

If your blog uses URL’s which include ‘www.’ and others which do not, the search engines will index two versions of your blog and aside from the possible waste of bandwidth from double spidering, one of them will be filtered as duplicated content. While this problem might be real or just a storm in a tea cup, being pro-active seems to be the wisest option. You need to decide which system you want to use and stick to it, always!

The Redirections plugin by John Godley allows you to specify which system you want to use and will automatically create ‘301 redirection’ for other URL’s. For example, if you decide to use the ‘www.’ prefix any link to your blog that does not contain the prefix will automatically be redirected to the correct URL which contains the ‘www.’ prefix.

The major advantage of using this plugin is that it also creates re-directs if you choose to change a post slug (used for the post file name). It also creates redirects if you decide to change your permalink structure and already have posts indexed in the search engines using the old permalink structure.

2) Create Optimized post title tags

The SEO Title Tag plugin by Stephan Spencer is an essential plugin. By default WordPress places your blog name, a separator and then your post name in the title of each page (i.e. between the <title> tags). The SEO Title Tag plugin reverses this and places your post name before your blog name in the title. From a search engine optimization stand point this is advantageous, because:
- It gives the keywords in your title more prominence.
- It provides more meaningful search engine listing results.
- It provides more meaningful browser bookmark names.

One of the major advantages of this plugin is that you have the ability to create a unique title tag for your blog index page and separate title tags for your category pages. By default, WordPress just uses the blog name for the index title and category names for the category page titles.

3) Include description and keyword meta tags in your blog’s <head> tags…

Including meta keyword tags in your blog’s header is not a necessity, most search engines ignore them, but including them won’t harm your search engine optimization chances on some of the simpler search engines.

Some search engines will use your meta description in their search listings, others like Google will display all or part of a sentence which contains the first instance of the keyword or phrase being searched. The most obvious thing to do would be to add your keyword phrases into the meta description tag, but these must contain a call-to-action (e.g. make the reader want to read your article).

Creating a compelling meta description which includes all your keyword phrases makes it somewhat difficult for programmers to build a plugin for creating automated meta description tags…

The most common meta description solutions are plugins which take the first 100 or 150 characters from the first sentence to include them in the meta description. The most effective meta keywords plugins are those which also handle the tags you add to each post. Here are two plugins for you to consider:

i.    The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin by Christine Davis is the ultimate tagging solution for bloggers, but it can also include the tags you add to your posts as meta keywords. This plugin can be used for a number of different features on your blog, so it makes sense to use it instead of different plugins for each feature.

ii.    The Head META Description plugin by Kaf Oseo takes your post excerpt or if you don’t enter one, the first 20 words of your post content and includes them in a meta description tag.

To get the most out of this plugin you need to get into the habit of writing an attention grabbing post exert (or first sentence) for all your posts. This is a good article writing habit to get into whether you use the plugin or not.

Instructions for installing all the plugins during these 17 days and for configuring your blog are given in “Installing the Plugins” post…

See you tomorrow.

Happy Blogging,

Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
yahoo:  whoisalejandro
skype:  whoisalejandro

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Basic “Out the Box” WordPress SEO settings

In this report I am assuming that you have already installed a WordPress blog, but if you have not, installing WordPress is not difficult. The easiest method is use Fantastico found on most hosting which uses cPanel.

If you want to install your blog manually and aren’t sure how to do it, CNet has a video you can watch here.

If you want to know how to set up a MySQL database, watch this quick video tutorial here.

While most blogging platforms tend to do well in search engine rankings, the default WordPress settings are not very well optimized. There are a few changes you need to make which will give your blog the edge over those with no optimization, but it is worth noting that good search engine rankings depend more on your actual blog posts, posting frequency and the number of back links to your blog. Here are the basic “out the box” changes you must carry out on your WordPress blog:

1.    Change the default permalink structure.

The /%category%/%postname% permalink is the most commonly advised, but to the search engines your blog post appears in two places. If you look at the URL as it shows in your browser, it appears as follows:
http://www.your-blog.com/your-catagegory/your-post/

But your post can also be found here:

http://www.your-blog.com/your-catagegory/your-post/index.php

To keep your permalinks constant you can force WordPress into naming posts with a URL which contains a suffix, for example you could use the following permalink:

/%category%/%postname%.php

Your blog post can now only be found at:

http://www.your-blog.com/your-catagegory/your-post.php

To change your permalink structure, open your WordPress Admin Panel and click on “Options” then “Permalinks”. In the “Custom structure” text box enter the following:

/%category%/%postname%.php

Then click on the “Update Permalink Structure” button.

2.    Next you need to rename the default category from “Uncategorized” to a phrase related to your blog under which all your default posts will be saved. It is not essential to name this particular category after a keyword phrase, think of your readers first. For example you could use the phrase “From My Point of View” as the name for the default category. Most of your posts will be fairly short, and often your point of view on some topic, making this the perfect place to file these posts.

You can change the default category by editing it in the “Manage / Categories” section of your control panel.

Any longer informative posts or reviews MUST be saved under categories which are named after a keyword phrase. For example if you had a blog related to promoting websites, you could name one of your categories “Increase Website Traffic” and all the posts you write about increasing traffic to a website should be posted under this category.

3.    Delete all of the default links in the “Blogroll / Manage Blogroll” section of your WordPress control panel (”Links / Manage Links” in older installations). Linking to arbitrary blogs will hurt your rankings in the search engines. One of the best ways to link to other blogs is to use “in context” links by mentioning them in posts that you write.

4.    Remove unnecessary links in your blog footer template. The links in your footer should only point to pages on your blog (unless the terms of use for the theme you are using require a link back to the theme creator). You can edit the footer template in the “Presentation / Theme Editor” section of your Wordpress control panel. The text will vary depending on which theme you are using, and how you edit this file depends on your personal preferences, but you should include a copyright notice which links to your copyright policy.

5.    Make sure your WordPress theme only uses the <h1> headline tags once in the individual post pages (and that should only be for the headline of your post). Most themes use <h1> tags for the headlings in the side bar, so you will need to manually edit these to <h2> or preferably <h3> tags. Unfortunately this also means editing the CSS file to return the sidebar headings to their previous formatting.

Tomorrow’s topic will be how to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking Potential: Essential SEO Plugins.

Until then - Happy Blogging!

Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455
yahoo:  whoisalejandro
skype:  whoisalejandro

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Blogging is a concept that started in late 90s. It used to be a way to comment an existing webpage, an opportunity for visitors and readers to react or voice out one’s opinion on the said page. What started as a single-sentence commentary has evolved into pages of personal take on just about anything and everything under the sun. As it continues to move forward, online advertising has tapped into the blog’s potential. Here are 5 reasons why you should use blogging as an Internet Marketing tool.

1. Blogging is simple. The simplest way to get your piece on the net is through blogging. No skills are necessary… an average adult can read and type, or at least click a mouse. It’s like having a virtual piece of paper and you just write your ideas, experiences, new products, and hope that the truth behind your articles comes out and entice your reader to also try your product. If you have a computer and an Internet connection (who doesn’t?) then you can blog and advertise.

2. Blogging is authentic. In this day and age where advertising saturates our lives, we question the credibility of promoters’ claims. However, in blogs, real people share their real-life experiences, unscathed by paid advertising. Reading blogs about first-hand product use is like talking to people about their first-hand experience. You definitely want to buy a tried and tested product.

3. Blogging is free. Because blogging is yet to be proven as a mainstream online advertising media, most sites see it as something to augment current marketing tools and thus offer it for free. Any opportunity for free webspace is definitely a bonus especially to businesses that are starting up. Needless to say, paid blog pages can generate more income for your seriously growing business.

4. Blogging builds credibility. As you get more and more into writing your experiences on a particular product or industry, your readers come to realize that they can depend on your posts for their own information needs. As such, you become an expert on it; as a consequence, more readers visit your site and more bloggers link to your blogs. As companies and professional organizations notice the growth of your readership base, they may soon get in touch with you for advertising on your blog page, or make you an affiliate, which pays for every referral generated from your blog site.

5. Blogging builds your market. Unless you are a Hollywood star, chances are, only your Mom reads your posts. Mom has a lot of friends, so she lets her friends know how interesting your blog site is. But you need not depend on Mom to increase your readership base. Look into the following ways to build your market through blogging:

• -By using your e-mail. Today, blogging is overcoming the e-mail’s popularity in quickly and effectively reaching and expanding a market. In this age of speed and quick access, logging in and downloading e-mail is simply taking longer than clicking into a blog site. Let them explore your site by using a short e-mail message as teaser to your blog site. If your e-mail is on an entirely different subject, use your e-mail signature to give a link to the site.

• -By using subscription. An easy way to get your readers e-mail is to give them an opportunity to subscribe to your blogsite. Keep some exclusive information for your subscribers to entice readers to subscribe and give their e-mail address. Just be responsible in using their e-mail address, as the last thing you want is a comment on your blog that you are a spammer.

• -By understanding your readers. Conduct a simple survey for your readers to understand their profile and advertising preferences. Ask consumers to give you feedback on a post, an ad link, or a trial that you shared. In this way, it is like interviewing your readers without the commitment and intrusion of a face-to-face interview.

• -By joining a blog network –A network of blogs maybe a collection of blog sites that share the same industry, interest, readership base, payment mode, etc. Consumers find credibility and convenience in clicking one link to several real bloggers about a single subject. Clearly, more bloggers are better than one.

• -By using RSS. RSS is the fastest growing technology on the Internet today. As such, having RSS feeds to your blog is definitely another means of generating awareness for your readership base. Having a variety of feeds can add interest to your blog site.

Give your business or online presence a boost by effectively using blogging as an Internet marketing tool.

To your Online Success,

Alejandro Reyes
Online Entrepreneur
916.947.2455
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro

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