Become a Blogger & Do it Often!

If you want your website to rank well in search engines you must have a blog on your website.  Blogs create fresh content and add pages to your website.  You are probably already an expert in your field and everyone has a story to tell.

If you’re passionate about what you do and your business, then it shouldn’t be hard for you to think of a story to tell your customers on a
regular basis!

Here is an example of a Real Estate Blog.  There are numerous sites that provide suggestions for topics that you can write that are relevant to your business.  No matter what line of business you’re in, customers will appreciate hearing your story!  Another interesting blog I found was this Bean Bag Blog.

Make your content interesting and unique.  Try to avoid copying other people’s content, as this will not assist you!  There are numerous stories about bloggers who are now enjoying substantial income from their blogs.  They have done this, simply by writing regularly on a topic that interest them and they are knowledgeable about.

Once you’ve written a blog post, then you should bookmark it on sites such as Stumbleupon - Linkedin - Diigo & Digg

You can also ‘tweet’ it on Twitter  and add your link on your Facebook page!  You do have a Facebook page don’t you?

Within your blog, you can create links back to other pages on your website.  For example, have you seen our article on SEO for beginners?

Make sure you add an image that will grab a reader’s attention.  A blog post is like an advertisement.  It may be seen by thousands of potential customers.  When you upload an image make sure your image has ‘alt image tags’ that are relevant to your post.  Search engines can’t see
pictures, only the file name or the ‘alt image tag’ you add to the image.

And last but not least, add a link back to your posts from your newsletter.  If you’re sending a regular e-newsletter to your customer base, are you linking back to your website in order to increase traffic?  Or are you simply writing newsletter content in an email with no links and hence
no benefits to your website traffic?

I hope you enjoyed this post!

Showing Your Expertise Can Pay Off

The word “expert” has been overused through time, in some cases being used to describe anyone who has ever had even a passing interest in a subject. For those who pay attention to such things, there is however a real benefit to being considered an expert, and to having the ear of a true expert when looking for advice. When looking to get traffic to your website, showing expertise in your chosen area is certainly no bad thing.

Let’s assume for the sake of example that your area of expertise is tennis. Since an early age you have watched it, played it, read about it and talked about it. You decide to set up an online tennis store selling memorabilia and kit for the sport. People are far more likely to pay attention to your efforts if you show that you are someone “in the know” when it comes to tennis – and the quickest way to do this is to show your expertise online. You can join a tennis forum and post on there, or set up a blog dealing with tennis news.

It helps if you can look at the subject in a relatively innovative way – with a touch of humor, or by focusing on an often ignored aspect of it. By doing this you will carve out a reputation as someone who not only writes well, but has their own ideas and is worth reading for the fresh perspective they bring to the subject. Any business ventures you start online in the future will benefit from this reputation.

Getting The Basics Right

Traffic is king in the world of the Internet. You can have excellent content and technically good websites which never do much business because people never actually come to read them. If no-one is bothering to read the sites, then they might as well not exist. And because people have to actually consciously visit the website, it is not enough for it to be good – it needs also to be prominent. How you make the website prominent is up to you, but there are time-honored ways which work better than any other.

By far and away, the main traffic centers of the Internet are search engines. If we are going to keep the word “traffic” in something like its most popular context (vehicles on the road) then search engines are the Internet’s airports. If you want your site to be visited by as many people as possible, it is simply essential to submit the site to the search engines – once this is done, the software used by search engines will take the step of visiting the site and collecting all the information connected to it on the Internet. From there, they can give it a ranking.

When your site is on the front page of a search engine – ideally Google, by far and away the most popular – it will be read by a huge portion of the people who search for relevant sites. It is therefore vitally important to make sure that you give your site every chance of being ranked highly by the search engines – using SEO and ensuring that people who like it link to it – as by doing this you will increase its prominence and make sure that traffic breeds more traffic.

Know Your SEO

SEO is a real buzzword in the present day world of the internet. People who run blogs and other websites are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of search engine optimization, and are beginning to use it more and more to attract visitors to their site. The many benefits of SEO are known to a lot of people, and a quick Google for the term will return millions of results. For anyone looking to get more visitors to their site, SEO is one of those things that is considered indispensable. It is important to know as much as you can learn about SEO.

Knowing about SEO entails a bit of reading, but the time you spend reading will be well rewarded. For many people, the important thing about SEO is using keywords in large enough quantities, but it is not all about quantity. In fact, SEO relies almost as much, if not more, on where and when you use the keywords, as well as how you use them. it will take an hour or two to completely inform yourself on the essentials of SEO as well as the little bonuses that it provides for the assiduous user.

It is also important to realize that SEO is not an end in itself – you need to make sure that what people see when they visit your site is something they will want to read now, and come back to in future. Therefore you should make sure that what you write on your website is not just rich in keywords, but rich in interest as well.

Widgets – What Are They?

Blogging has become a massively popular way of getting a message out to the people who may be interested in reading it. As a result, it has taken off into the mainstream in the last few years, and people who would have got all their information from newspapers and magazines five or ten years ago now add to this by reading blogs regularly. This has had the knock-on effect of making blogging profitable for people and companies who are internet experts.

On many blogs these days, you will see at the bottom of the post that there is a list of different icons which, if moused over, will give you a range of options. Among these options are the chance to add a post to one’s Facebook feed or to post a tweet on Twitter encouraging people to go and read it. There are far more options besides this, and each of them gives the reader a chance to alert other people to this site. You can add these options to your blog posts by placing what is called a “widget” on your blog.

There are various sources for widgets on the Internet. A quick Google search for the term will give you a vast range of options, and when you add a widget to your blog you will give yourself more exposure to Internet users. This can create a domino effect, too. If one person Tweets one of your articles, the people who read their feed are liable to read it and if they like it, they may continue the chain. In this way, a single click on a widget can lead to tens, even hundreds of visits to your site.