blogging 102

Reading time: 8 – 12 minutes What is natural search engine optimization (SEO)? Natural, or Organic, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s a process of making your site more search engine friendly by optimizing the entire website design and content. Then the site will be visible in SERPs against optimized keywords or Key phrase. Why is SEO important? Search engine optimization is important for a number of reasons including: 36% of searchers attribute top organic position with brand quality 60% to 70% of all search traffic comes from organic listings 90% of organic search traffic is driven from the top five listings 62% of searchers view only one page of results before clicking (Jupiter Research) Having the No. 1 listing in both organic and paid search can increase click rates by three times How do natural search differ from paid search? The primary differences are: Paid search can be launched quickly. Natural search generally takes months to show a... 

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes Gauging Progress is a tough thing to do for a new blog and one of the hardest things for you to do when a blog is only ten days old.  it is even harder to gauge the progress than it is to attract visitors.  None the less you need to do it, just as much as you need to attract new visitors every day.  Let’s take a look at Meme Connection again. Since the blog went online we have dropped our Alexa number 3.2M and that is down from 3.5 on Sunday when I checked it last and down from 7.5M on the first.  i think I may well meet the goal I set of under 1M by the end of the month at this rate if I keep it up. Google has been good to us as well.  For the unquoted terms meme and connection the site or sites linking to Meme Connection carry nine of the top ten slots.  For a site that went online fifteen days ago that is pretty impressive even if the terms aren’t well searched, since there are 6.5M search results. Google Analytics says my visitors... 

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes I was asked recently how to get a 1000 visitors a day to your blog network.  If you have a network it is quite easy.  The more blogs you have the more content you have, and more content you have the better chance you will get hits from search results.  Here is my quick list of do’s and don’ts. Content isn’t enough.  You need content with good keywords and for that material to be indexed.  If you run a wordpress blog the Google XML Sitemap Plugin is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for getting indexed.  If you want to be properly indexed it is highly important that you use good content specific keywords and tags.  I generate specific keywords with Wordsfinder and use the Calais Tagaroo Plugin to generate Semantic tags, both of which appear as meta keywords to search engines thanks to my theme. Write about popular things.  If you follow the first rule of good tagging and and getting regularly indexed, writing about... 

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes Something is up at Technorati. For more than a month now I have been having problems with them properly indexing one of my blogs. Despite the fact that it was being updated either manually or automatically with daily digest posts, http://www.bradsotherblog.com was simply not getting its ping through to Technorati. This just isn’t me, either. The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog. After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of. They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails. Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done. I checked back a week later and nothing since that...