Having a blog with little or no visitors at all? Seriously, it is not surprise to see that there are many blogs are read only by the owner’s friends and families. The Blogsphere, after all, is a crowded place that’s full with competition. In fact, there are more than 130 million blogs indexed by Technorati since year 2002 and the figure is still growing.

Apparently, it takes a lot more hard work to own a successful blog that stand out from the crowd. Besides creating valuable blog content, bloggers nowadays are required to learn more in Internet marketing as well as search engine optimization (SEO) as these are the basic methods to expand readership.

Nevertheless, not every blog needs an SEO expert. Most mom and pop blogs, in fact, can achieve huge improvement with some simple SEO efforts. For instance, here are 9 simple ways you can improve your blog SEO scores.

1. Be a big fish in a small pond

The first thing to do in SEO is always keyword research. Get to know what the users are searching in your niche, learn your competition, and come up with a list of targeted keywords.

Smart bloggers avoid direct search engine competition with big players. Instead, they go for long tail keywords with moderate search volume and low competition.

2. Pick a keyword-rich domain name

A domain name is where blog readers start to know you. It should memorable and contains your primary keyword.

There are lots of examples proving that a keyword-rich domain name helps a lot in term of SEO. Blog ranks high for certain keywords just because the words are in their domain.

3. Focus on one to two keywords on each page

It is almost impossible for a webpage to rank high for 15 – 20 different keywords. Hence, it’s wiser to create several posts/pages and optimize each of them for a small number of different keywords.

Say that you are running a financial blog and wish to rank high on a series of technical terms like MACD, EMA, and RSI chart. The best way to do so is to create a different page for each of these terms and build different incoming links to these pages.

4. Customize your title tags

Title tags are the most important on-page SEO factor but yet most blog platforms emphasize so little on the issue. Most blog platforms use post title as the title tag and that is certainly not good enough. Title tags should be handcrafted independently and it should be more than just your blogpost title.
I am not sure with other blog platform but in case you are using WordPress, there are a few plugins that allow you to customize your title tags. Stephan’s SEO Title Tag Plugin (http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/) for example, is a good one to go with.

5. Use heading tags wisely

Heading tags (<h1></h1>) is another tags that are misused by most bloggers. I am not sure why but most blog theme designers like to use heading tags for sidebar titles. These heading tags are used on irrelevant words like Categories, About, Archive which offer zero SEO value.

To make sure your blog do well in term of SEO, such heading tags must be alternated. You can modify your CSS and quit using heading tags at your sidebar; or you can insert targeted keywords into your sidebar.

6. Make your blog reachable

Don’t do silly mistakes on robots.txt, don’t fool around with your site navigation; always have a link to your achieved posts; make sure your blog has a XML sitemap. All in all, make sure your blog can be easily crawled by search engines.

We want the bots to index deep and wide on your blog content. So make sure you provide enough roadways for the spiders.

7. Proper optimized internal links

Interlinking your own blogposts is not enough. As you already know, search engines (Google especially!) pay a lot of attention to links and both of your internal and external links count.

You only have control over internal link thus that’s the least you can do with linking. Make sure your internal links are filled with descriptive keywords and avoid using anchor texts like “click here” and “read more” that are meaningless to search engines.

8. Be consistent

Posting consistently improve your blog creditability and expand readerships. More over, it increases the number of pages indexed in search engine’s database and in turn, increases the probability your blog to be found by searchers.

9. Build links

You need incoming links as much as possible. Trade, beg, buy, or even steal links from websites or blogs related to your blog. There are various ways how you can build links – writing guest post, directory submission, blogroll exchange, link trades, forum signatures, and text link ads are some of the common known methods – some of these methods contain risk of being filtered by search engines while some do not.

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This guest post is brought to your by Jerry of Web Hosting Secret Revealed. Jerry inspects and reviews web hosting companies based on his own usage experience. Readers looking for honest hosting advice are recommended to read further at his blog.

WordPress MU 2.7 was just recently released.

I have really wanted to start using WordPress MU because I keep getting more and more WordPress Blogs, both for me and for my clients.  However, I did not want to start out learning WordPress MU in the older version because I knew the upgrade was coming.

Would you like to know how geeky Marketer/IT Guys spend their evenings after their kids go to sleep?

I will be digging into WordPress MU 2.7 and seeing how I can bend it to my goals.  So fun!

If you are one of the many authors, speakers, consultants or specialists that read this blog, you will like this post.  I have been experimenting for about 9 months with different membership website software and finally I found the winner.  Wishlist Member

I went through a progression of different membership website software packages.  I tried Moodle, but it was too complex for what I was trying to do (and was hard to make look good.)  Then I tried a paid vesion on Ning, but that is more social networking and not great for leading learning.  I also tried Joomla, Drupal and DotNetNuke.

Finally I came to realize that a membership site is about publishing highly valuable content in a clean, private environment.  I decided upon WordPress and it was a great decision.

The only down side was the wordpress membership plugin made it necessary for me to set up people’s accounts.  That was just not acceptable.

Then I found WordPress Wishlist Member.  I already had ecommerce, affiliates and more.  I just needed an easy way to integrate membership and manage them.

The Wishlist development team does a great job with online training videos and their support is very good as well.  They have also just updated the membership website software to include paypal integration that looks fantastic.  I am looking forward to trying that option.

If you have ever thought about starting a membership website but did not know what is the best membership website software and the best membership site platform, I strongly recommend keeping it simple and powerful with the combination of wordpress and Wishlist Membership.

Want more infomation about membership site creation?  Visit How to create a membership site.

If you enjoy marketing on the web, you might be tempted to start a blog about marketing, social media, twitter or some other passion you have.  Don’t!

Here are seven reasons you should not start a marketing blog.

1. A broad marketing blog has no appeal except to other marketers (and probably not even them) – it is not specific enough.
2. Too much competition for general marketing blogs
3. Does not address people’s specific marketing needs.
4. Marketing as a topic is constantly changing, to stay relevant is a full time job.
5. Very difficult to not be a ME TOO marketing blog.
6. Clients do not care about marketing – they are looking for people to solve their marketing issues, not wax poetically about them.
7. Niche topics get great traffic – broad topics like marketing just do not perform well.

Of course, there are always exceptions to this rule.  Chris Brogan does a great job.  But most people that I know that write about marketing find it a good exercise but do not get big benefits.  Worth doing, yes.  But don’t get your hopes up.

Recently I set up a very specific niche blog for a client that targeted a good set of keywords.  It seemed very narrow to me, but he was not in a hurry to have readers.  Two weeks later and a brand new domain with 3 articles on it, he got 2,500 unique visitors.  The lesson of this story is that you should not write about what everyone needs and can already find, you should write about what a small group needs but cannot find.

WordPress is an Open Source Blog Package.  I write about it occasionally, but really should more often.  I spend a lot of time playing with WordPress, customizing it, setting it up, etc.

One challenge is always to find good Free WordPress Themes.

WordPress Themes are a package of templates, images and style sheets that you upload to a specific folder and unzip.  Then you can activate it and customize it via the admin interface of WordPress.

So via Twitter I found this Free WordPress Theme called Apollo today – please note that I have not installed it yet, but is looks very clean and nice.  I am looking forward to giving it a try.  Go look at all the great layouts and they even provide a bunch of generic logos.

I have paid for good themes in the past.  I do not mind doing that, but with more and more quality free themes coming out, the days of paying for a theme seem numbered.

Over on the Servant of Chaos blog there is a new post about the old z-list.

I am copying that list below this post, but instead of rehashing the old blog meme, I think it would more interesting to start something new that integrates Twitter and Blogging.

So here it is: You may copy this to your blog and add 3-5 people that you think provide the most interesting experience combining blogging and twitter. If they are not active on both, do not add them to the list. Feel free to add yourself, but don’t be a dork and do it if you are not using both tools.

I would suggest you follow everyone on the list in Twitter (since they are all added because of being interesting)

The Z-List TwitBloggers

Add your favorites and pass it along

You may or may not want to copy the blow list as part of the post – your choice.

Originally Started by Mack

Today I released one of the more detailed reviews I have ever done.  See my iLearning Global Review.

There are several reasons that you want to do reviews.

1. Sell products
2. Generate better traffic
3. Help your audience find good products.
4. Help someone get publicity for a quality product.

These are all very good reasons, but you must be sure that you make your affiliation clear.  For example, in that iLearning Global Review I have a disclosure near the top stating my affiliation.

What makes a good review?

First, you should be aware of search engine results.  If you title your review xyz review, it will get much better placement in search engines instead of something more vague and clever.  When reviewing books, I like to use the title of the book and a hyphen, then the authors name.  A good example of this is my Twilight – Stephanie Meyers marketing post that shot my traffic through the roof.  (Not necessarily the traffic I am looking for, but oh well.)

Next, repeat the title fairly frequently instead of using it, the book, etc.  Not so much that it becomes annoying, but get some good keyword saturation.

Add an image or a video to make the page more interesting and appealing to the visitor.

Use tags – this can get you the great double listing in Google.

Mix it up.  Don’t just say iLearning Global Review over and over.  Also write things like, “When I was reviewing iLearning Global…”  The search engines look for this variation of language and it will see you as a more credible site.

If you follow these simple tips, your review should rank much higher in search engines and generate more traffic and interest in your website or blog.

Reprint From Chris Brogan

In writing up my visit to Gannett, I realized that I was missing something that I wanted: I went to link Jim Lenahan’s name, and then realized that he doesn’t have a blog or any kind of external web presence. I wanted to link Michael Maness, their VP of Innovation, and realized he doesn’t have an external web presence. Ditto Ken Paulson, etc.

It dawns on me that this is a missed opportunity in several ways.

1. Links are love. If I link to them, Google values that link and helps search traffic find the site.
2. Links encourage exploration. You click links on my site all the time. I watch you do it.
3. Web presence gives us a public glimpse of you. It gives people backstory.
4. Web presence provides you more opportunities to meet new people.
5. Web presence makes a larger showing of your company’s thinkers.

Not every employee needs a blog, and not every employee should be outward facing from a web perspective (several might not want that, actually). But the folks who have jobs that put them in contact with people like me? I think you need a web presence, please.

Reprint From Chris Brogan

Visit: Employee Ambassador Program

Sometimes I like to write a quick post on how to do something technical that I found hard to solve.

How to embed video hosted on the Amazon S3 Web Service.

First, why Amazon S3?

Amazon basically offers storage of files at a very low cost and provides very scalable and reliable storage and backup at unbeatable prices.

How to Embed a Video stored on Amazon S3

Many sites are offering courses and membership areas to help you embed video into your blog or website that is stored on Amazon S3. I did not feel like paying for the information because I knew I could figure it out. I am a technical guy. But I was pulling my hair out because I kept almost getting it to work, but not quit.

Eventually I downloaded JW FLV Media Player, posted the files in the root directory of my website and used the site setup wizard to get the code just right.

Finally, I found that this works with FLV files but not the other file types I was using, so I need to make all FLV from now on.

The good news is that with this code and wizard I can now embed video into my private membership sites that are hosted on Amazon S3.

If you are looking for the best video hosting solution that will allow you to embed video into your blogs and websites, I assure you the above solution using Amazon S3 and the Free Video Player are great options.

[UPDATE Nov. 22, 2008]

When I sent to embed the code into WordPress, I found that WordPress has disabled the embed tag because of security issues. Luckily, I found the Wordoress Plugin pb-embedFlash – The documentation was not great because it lacked the basic examples in a clear way. However, I experimented with it a bit and found I could simply type [flash url] and it would replace the tag with the flash player and play the FLV file.

Once you figure it out, it is even easier than downloading the player yourself and setting things up.

Blogs are a great way to Demonstrate Your Knowledge.

In fact, outside of becoming a regular guest on big TV shows and writing columns in a newspaper, I would say that it is the next best way.  And the blog can certainly land you those kinds of opportunities in the future.

Many people think they have to come up with new, creative articles for their blog every day.  Instead, you have to remember that the people that are reading your blog probably know less than you and are looking for insight into your topic.  All you need to do is demonstrate your knowledge on the topic by writing good, informative posts about thing you already know.  You may even find it a bit boring, but your readers will not.

By demonstrating your knowledge in a clear, professional manner, you will be building your visibility and personal brand.  The result will eventually be:

• Sales
• Invitations to speak
• Partnerships
• Job Offers
• Other writing opportunities
• And many other things

There are a huge number of opportunities to build your personal brand online.  However, if you want to build expert status, a blog is the best way to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise, coupled with email integration. (You want to build your list as well as build blog traffic)

Don’t get hung up on writing.  Just look around at what you are currently doing and write about it for someone that has never done that before.  Your blog will be packed full of valuable information in no time.  To demonstrate your knowledge you only have to be consistent writing the things you already know.