A Good Time is Blog Time

So is getting traffic to your blog a black art or is there a secret formula that guarantees you success. Perhaps just paying Google for position is the answer. I attended an advanced tips and techniques webinar with Google the other day discussing lots of different ways for getting a better click through rate on your Adsense ads. There were some really good techniques shared but not much said about getting traffic to your blog, a little bit to be fair but really not that much.

Now for me the biggest influence on Adsense income is getting traffic to your blog in enough quantities that you get a reasonable number of clicks. So when they opened the webinar up to a questions and answers session, I asked one simple question. I basically put up the question what is the most important feature of a blog that will result in Google placing it high up on the search engine results page, the consequence of which is getting traffic to your blog.

I was playing devils advocate a bit, because I pretty much knew what the response to that question would be…..

Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry about that, but I needed to get your attention and being downright rude is just one of the ways of doing it. Of course there are other much nicer ways but if you are reading this then it did the trick this time and makes my point. I once saw a sign outside a public house in the UK that said ‘filthy ale and awful food’ everyone welcome. You just know that at some point you are going to have to go in and find out what its all about and whether the sign is true or just a very clever marketing ploy.

Well blogging is about clever marketing as well, without marketing your blog in a way that people actually take the time to stop and read it you are never going to convey to them that you actually know what you are talking about or give them the chance to find out that you are actually producing some great content worth reading i.e. you know how to write a good blog post.

Assuming that your main objective is to gain readership for your blog then writing a good blog post is all about 3 things: Read the rest of this entry »

As I have been discussing this subject recently I thought it would be a good idea to publish this video which has been produced by Google who have also been discussing the same subject and advising on what to do about inadvertent production of duplicate content.

The video also covers the implementation of the new rel=canonical tag which can be used to identify content that has been duplicated deliberately on a single domain.

Most importantly though, it does confirm that the duplicate content penalty is a MYTH

Read the rest of this entry »

The answer to the above question is relatively straight forward and is a little like cholesterol. There is good and bad duplicate content.

So if you are going to be penalised or not depends on the type of duplicate content you are involved with and is why you need to understand which is which.

Bad Duplicate Content

Read the rest of this entry »

What do you think the biggest mistake is that anyone makes with respect to website search optimization and blog writing????

Placing too much emphasis on keywords and keyword phrases.

The reason when you see it is pretty obvious -

Read the rest of this entry »

An Internet marketing guide stresses the importance of using only quality content for blog pages, yet, the question remains: how can one decide what is quality web content and what is not? I would suggest that we start from the very nature of the blog: a highly informational and personal site which tackles subjects on a specific topic. Hence, when designing the blog, don’t make it too complex, stick to simple structures that allow users to easily follow the content of the blog. The frame should also be very simple and the eventual ads and links need to naturally blend in the content of the blog enhancing and improving the visitors experience on the site. Web design provides a great advantage of using similar fonts and formats, so only some elements on the page stand out and you should use these features for optimal affect.

Furthermore, you may have learned by now that you need to create the site content around some high-in-demand keywords that users type in the search box of the engine. The more the keywords, the higher the chances to have your blog appear in the first result pages. However, many bloggers misunderstand keyword density. The blog content should naturally include the keywords in an easy-to-read kind of way; a keyword density that goes higher than 2 or 3% could make the articles less appealing to the reader, this is generally because the flow of the text is lost and makes reading the article less natural and more difficult to follow. It is worth looking for sites that can provide you with a keyword density analyzer to assess whether you have overdone things on that aspect and provide you with the option of rewording the text to a more natural state.

Read the rest of this entry »