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.

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

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.

A search-engine-friendly path is a directory path on your server that search-engines, with their crawlers, can easily traverse (read here for a more detailed explanation).
By using them, you are sure that Google, Yahoo and others will index all of your site, thus giving more possibilities that your posts can be found by generic queries.

A search-engine-friendly path looks like this:

http://www.moneyblogger.net/2005/08/04/use-search-engine-friendly-paths/

while a non-search-engine-friendly path look like this:

http://www.moneyblogger.net/?m=200508

This is a very important step you should consider in order to increment the possibilities of being found when people is searching for a topic you have dealt with. Another important thing to remember is not to change the URL format once the blog/site has been made public: in fact, people may have bookmarked, or linked from other blogs/sites and changing URLs could result in dead links.

The blogosphere is really a world apart. Once upon a time, when I had a commercial site, I avoided putting competitor’s links on my site: I didn’t want people go to them. That’s obvious!

But today it’s different: not only because I deal with a niche - i.e., blog owners wanting to promote themselves and earning money - but also because certain rules in the blogosphere are not valid anymore.
I do not see anymore putting a link in a post, or on my blogroll, a possible way of users to go away; and this is because blogs are just reminders, quick notes to other articles, sites, newspapers, blogs.
If you avoid to put a link, you’re getting trouble: first, because the information you’re dealing with typically is not yours. Secondly, because visitors expect links in a blog: if you don’t, people will be tired of reading your voice only and won’t believe your truth.

Are you going to lose visitors if you put links to other sites and blogs on your site? No. If you give people information, people will recall that in the future, and will seek information again on your site.

Blogs are the most democratic expression on the Internet.