Money Blogger

With all the shuffling that’s been seen in the search engine world within the last year, the issue of obvious optimizing has become a hot button. The current line of thinking is that most engines (especially Google) are on the lookout for sites that purposely make an effort to optimize their pages in order to get high rankings. While this theory has not been proven, I agree that obvious optimization is not a good thing. Not exclusively because of what Google might think, but because of what your site visitors might think. When a Web site is created with the intent of having it ranked highly, one thing often happens. The focus gets placed solely on the optimization and is taken almost completely away from the visitor. This leaves your site in a dangerous state of unbalance. Let’s take a look at some examples. New Orleans Web Design Our New Orleans Web design firm offers a high level of creativity to businesses located in the general area. Our New Orleans Web design styles are never made from templates. Each New Orleans Web design is a custom creation just for your site. I can’t count how many times I’ve visited Web design sites that were targeting local audiences and found copy similar to this example. Forget for a moment that this copy is completely “me, us, we, our” centered, and let me ask you a question. If someone asked you what your company did would you say, “Web design” or “New Orleans Web design”? Yes, I know the keyphrase is “New Orleans Web design,” but using that phrase interchangeably with “Web design” shatters the flow of natural language. Breaking up that phrase will help you retain your appeal to the engines and your site visitors. It will also keep you from appearing to be over optimized. You’ll also want to vary your terms to avoid absolutely bombarding the reader (and the engines) with the same keyphrases. That *may* mean the need for longer copy *if* your target audience is one that would respond well to longer copy. Try this instead: Progressive, creative, upbeat. Those are phrases that best describe many online businesses based in New Orleans. Web design for your organization should match your style. Never created from templates, the site designs you’ll receive will be truly reflective of your corporate personality. Because we work exclusively with companies located in or near New Orleans, Web designs retain that Big Easy feel. See the difference? By breaking the phrase up, you work with the flow of natural language instead of against it. To your site visitors and the engines, it appears the phrase is just part of a written conversation instead of something that has been purposely (and carelessly) tossed in for the sole benefit of higher rankings. So, is the flow of your current copy destroyed by keywords? Are you scaring off both the engines and your visitors? One quick check can help you decide. Read your copy out loud. (Or better yet, have someone else read your copy out loud.) Does it sound odd? Does reading it feel forced or stiff? Would the sentences you’ve written in your copy seem out of place in the course of a verbal conversation with someone? If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, you might better take a closer look at your Web page.

Karon Thackston © 2004, All Rights Reserved

About The Author Karon is author of “How To Increase Keyword Saturation (Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy).” Discover the secrets to creating SEO copy with a perfect balance between keywords and natural language.

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There’s just no way around it: Marketing online must involve some type of email marketing. And to utilize email correctly, automatic responders work exceptionally well. If you are using your autoresponder to sell a product or service, you must be very careful as to how you approach your potential customer. Few people like a hard sale, and marketers have known for years that in most cases, a prospect must hear your message an average of seven times before they will make a purchase. How do you accomplish this with autoresponders? It’s really quite simple, and in fact, the autoresponders make getting the message to your potential customers those seven times possible. On the Internet, without the use of autoresponders, you probably could not achieve that. Too often, marketers make the mistake of literally slamming the potential customer with a hard sales pitch with the first autoresponder message - this won’t work. You build interest slowly. Start with an informative message - a message that educates the reader in some way on the topic that your product or service is related to. At the bottom of the message, include a link to the sales page for your product. Use that first message to focus on the problem that your product or service can solve, with just a hint of the solution. Build up from there, moving into how your product or service can solve a problem, and then with the next message, ease into the benefits of your product - giving the reader more actual information with each and every message. Your final message should be the sale pitch - not your first one! With each message, make sure that you are giving the customer information pertaining to the topic - free information! This is what will keep them interested in what you have to say. This type of marketing is an art. It may take time to get it exactly right. Use the examples that other marketers have set for you. Pay attention to the messages that you receive from other marketers. Start a "swap" file, and keep those messages. Use some of the better sales copy for your own autoresponder messages - just make sure that yours doesn’t turn out to be an exact copy of someone else’s sales message! Remember not to start with a hard sale. Build your potential customers interest. Keep building on what the problem is, and how your product or service can solve that problem or fill that need. If you are doing this right, by the time the potential customer reads the last message in that series, they will be convinced enough to make a purchase!

You post a message, fine. It will be crawled by Google and be searchable, fine. But have you checked that the title of the page (that is, the title displayed on the title bar of the browser) reflects the title of your post? Because this is very important… let’s find out why:

• search engines like Google use the title of the page to rank the page better: in other words, the words contained in the title of the page will have more weight than if they were only inside the page
• when a user searches on Google and finds one of your posts, the title displayed would be more indicative. For instance, a user searches for "title your posts" on Google and finds this post. Would it be better that it is displayed: "MoneyBlogger" or "MoneyBlogger - Use title of your posts as title of the page"?

So, be sure to check if your blogging platforms allows to reflect the title of your posts in the title of the pages!

Ever thought of how many articles you should put in a page? The less, the better.

Actually, one article per page is the best thing you can do. In fact, this would help you in at least two ways:

• search engines will index separate content of your blog, and therefore searches will give users more possibility of finding your pages, since the pages will be uniform in content
• Adsense will work better, since the advertising provided will be targeted exactly on the topic of the page, and readers will be more prone to clicking on those ads

Accordingly to this post, having a minimalist blog layout let you maximize your Adsense performances.

Does it really work? Probably it does. In fact, when visitors have very few things to click and read on a single page, they will tend to "understand" better the page, and they will tend to click on more links. If these links are ads, it’s done.

The more pages you furnish to your readers, the more likely it will be that you will maximize your gains through advertising or referrals. Moreover, the more pages you have the more likely it will be that you will be found through different search queries on search engines.

Aside from writing a lot, what does that mean? Well, you can think to refer to related posts inside your posts, so that your readers can dig into more detail when reading your articles. And, if somebody is new, he/she can also understand what you are talking about.

Inviting guests is always a trouble: you’ve got to clean the house, prepare good food, tell your family that there will be guests on Sunday noon. You will also have to talk with them on various topics, entertain them, and be polite: they’re guests.

Guest blogging does not differ too much from this: if you invite somebody to write for a short (or even a long) period of time on your site, there are several things you have to check.

• prepare your visitors (your "family") to the fact that also somebody else will write on the blog, forever or for a short period of time
• introduce your guests in the best way, telling the world who they are, what they will do, why they will write on your blog
• then, and only then, let them post: to start with, a couple of short messages will be better; after all, they are probably strangers to your visitors
• always continue writing you, too: guest blogging does not mean letting somebody else run your blog. Otherwise, your style will be lost
• give your guests enough liberty, but always check what they post

Guest blogging is always useful, but in particular it becomes vital when you go on holiday and you can’t post messages from the beach. In that case, prepare also several generic messages, like those of the secret vault, and have them published periodically in your absence: you will be present on your blog even when on holiday, and this is a great sign of somebody who cares what he/she does.

I’ve already dealt in the recent past with the problem of not having good ideas or time to write. Let’s say you don’t have that secret vault I told you about: what could you do?

Well, if you don’t have too much to say, don’t say too much: also a short post, a review of another blog, a short comment on a newspaper article could be enough for a day or two: your readers will know you’re there and you’re not abandoning your blog.

It may sound foolish and obvious, but being on Google with a good ranking really makes some difference. People that doesn’t know you will search on Google for topics you may be dealing with: therefore, making sure that all your pages are searchable from Google is a good place to start.

As you know, Google among the other algorithms relies on PageRank, which is a system used to rank sites accordingly to the in-links they have: the more links you got from other sites to yours, the better you will be placed in the search results.
Therefore exchanging links with others and promoting yourself through blog directories will help you not only in being reached through this links, but will also help in being found through Google, since you will gather more and more importance.

Cooperation with others becomes a must.

Today you don’t have time posting, or have no ideas, or are too tired or too angry: it just happens. Should you leave your users without a single message from you? Of course, as explained here, you shouldn’t!

Every good blogger in fact has a secret vault with some messages prepared in the past: these messages are generic and not-related to any specific time. They become useful when you can’t for some reasons write, but you want to publish something.

Every day you write, consider if you have time and energy to write another generic article: if you do so, keep that precious article in your vault and use it "in emergency cases".

A little curiosity: this post - dealing with what to do when you can’t post - was written well before the date it was posted, and was posted because I had nothing else to say :)