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.

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.

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.

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 :)

According to Technorati, 80,000 new blogs are created every day. Despite the fact that I don’t know how many of these fall in disuse in a few weeks, I am pretty sure that among these blogs only 1% of them survives for more than a year.

You can easily see this reading blogs somewhere on the net: blogs tend to be abandoned, since there is lack of time or creativity of their authors, and a dream of an enterprise becomes suddenly a nightmare.

Blogging takes time, a lot of time: you can’t think of writing a blog in 10 minutes once a week. You have to read, and to read a lot, to make sure you’re updated with news. Then you have to think, to elaborate your thoughts and then write something. This process takes no more than 1-2 hours per day if you’re fast and are writing no more than 2 articles per day.
Do you want to earn blogging? Do it, but don’t think it’s easy-money.

If you can’t afford this time, every single day, weekends included, it will be tough for you to be a professional blogger.

I’ve already talked in this post about newsletters. Assuming that you got one, when should you send out emails?
If you followed my advices (you didn’t? Argh! :) you are sending it once a week. The worst days to send them happen to be the weekend.

In fact many users do not connect to the Internet during the weekend: okay, it depends, if you’re targeting nerds they do, but generally speaking there are less users connected to the Internet on Saturday and Sunday.
Since in the weekend people accumulates mail, do not try to send it on Monday or Tuesday: it won’t be noticed! Wednesday is the climax of the week: better to avoid job peaks.
So, the best time to send a weekly newsletter happens to be the closing of the week, Thursday or Friday (early) morning, since in these days people tend to work less and be more prone to distractions.

A very stupid tip, that may save you some newsletter unsubscriptions.

Many sites on the web have a newsletter where people receives the updated content of the site, the links to the articles or material recently published and so on.

Some blogs (not much) have the same newsletter: through that, owners send their latest news to the visitors, sometimes in the form of a digest.

Should you create one for your blog? It depends. First of all, a newsletter must be well-written, must have nice content well formatted, must be in plain-text and must have a low frequency (e.g., once a week).
A newsletter should be quite short to read: in this case, if you post a lot, make sure to have only the excerpts of the most important news of your blog, and nothing more.
A newsletter must also include a footer and a header, and inside the footer there should be enough information to unsubscribe the newsletter. As of these days, a newsletter must also have a double opt-in/double opt-out mechanism to prevent people being spammed.

So, do you want to comply to these rules? Remember that people subscribing to the newsletter are user that will come to your site if you incentivate them, otherwise they won’t: therefore, in the newsletter always place links to the articles on the site more than to other sites.

To end this post, let me clarify you that writing a good newsletter, once a week, no more than 25-40 text lines may take you up to half an hour/an hour, and therefore it might be heavy to carry on if you blog part-time.