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e_Marketing Blog Free Blog or Your Own Domain? Once you've decided to create your own blog, the first question you have to address is whether you want your blog to be hosted on your own web hosting account or be part of an already established site like wordpress.com, blogger.com, or one of the many other free blogging sites. If you use one of the free "hosted" blogging sites (Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog.com, and many more) you can create a brand new blog in about 15 minutes. When you choose this option you become part of a larger site such as wordpress.com and your address will be something like http://yourtownrealestate.wordpress.com or http://yourtownmoneymanager.blogspot.com The advantage of this approach is that it is fast and cheap. Plus you will get some traction and search engine exposure for your blog because it will be part of a much larger network that gets crawled by the search engines on a regular basis. But in my estimation, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. What Makes A Good Blog? Since I'm writing a series on "Creating A Successful Blog" I've been looking (not very diligently) for other opinions on what makes for a successful blog. One thing I've discovered is that there is no magic answer to this question. First of all, every blog speaks to a different audience in a different tone of voice. So what one group likes another group will find boring or maybe even overtly aggravating. I stumbled on an instance of this today when I followed a link from Lisa Barone's post called "Six Kickass Writing Resources for Bloggers". First on her list was "What Makes a Good Blog?" by Merlin Mann. Now I must admit there are several things in Merlin's list which I agree with, but I find the overall tone fairly aggravating. For instance, he says, "People start real blogs because they think about something a lot...They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person's obsessions take them." Frankly I don't see why "obsession" is a necessary part of blogging. Is it because in order to do real blogging we must express our personality; and expressing our personality necessarily involves creativity; and because creativity is so relatively scarce and difficult that it will not happen without an obsessive focus on something? Or is this just the way an obsessive person looks at it? Of course it takes all types. But there is a certain arrogance and air of superiority about talk of obsession and creativity that I can do without. WiMAX for Portland WiMAX service will soon be available in Portland, Oregon. What is WiMAX? It is a wireless alternative to cable or DSL. For a number of years this technology has promised to revolutionize the delivery of "last mile" service connecting homes and offices to internet access points. But these days the focus is more on mobile applications that make it a viable alternative to standard cell phone services. The provider of this service in Portland will be Clearwire, a company formed through joint cooperation of Sprint, Clearwire, Google, Intel, Comcast, and Time Warner. WiMAX will not be significantly cheaper than the alternatives, but it does promise to offer greater potential for merging disparate services such as internet, cell phone, Voip and cable tv. |
Linknet-News.com features news articles and news items in various categories including Health News, Real Estate News, Finance News, Marketing News, Business News, Entertainment News, Travel News, and more... How to Get Free Search Engine TrafficJan 29, 2006 -Linknet Internet News How to Get Free Search Engine Traffic Jan 29, 2006, Linknet Internet News - Effective webmasters and online marketers are constantly searching for ways to improve their search engine rankings.== Link Aufbau - Pagerank-Optimierung durch Aufbau von Links == The simple fact is that most websites get the majority of their traffic from search engines. So it is important to give the search engines what they are looking for. If you do, your site will do well in searches and the search engines will drive traffic to your site. There have been many changes over the last two or three years to the way search engines evaluate the importance of websites. Many of these changes have been spurred on by Google. But other engines such as Yahoo and MSN have followed suit. There is a general consensus among search engine optimization experts on many of the techniques and practices that enhance your website in the eyes of the search engines. Here are some of them. 1. Give your site a clearly focused theme - Your site should have a clearly focused theme which can be defined in terms of search phrases (or "keywords"). If your site has no clear theme, the search engines will not be of much help to you. Ask yourself if there is a small set of search phrases that people can use to find your site. If not, then go back to the drawing board and redefine your site. 2. Evaluate your keywords - Now let's assume you have decided on a theme, and you have defined it in terms of five or six primary search phrases (keywords.) It is time to analyze these search phrases and determine if anybody actually searches for them. There is no point in having a focused theme that no one is looking for. There are excellent free tools and services available to help you do this analysis. One of the easiest to use is the Keyword Selector Tool built into Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture.) Just enter a keyword and the tool will tell you how many searches have been done for that term in a recent period. It will also give you searches for related terms. 3. Start creating pages - Once you decide on your most important search terms (keywords) you are ready to start building pages. Give each search term its own page, and remember to focus, focus, focus. Be sure to put the keyword for each page in the page title (what shows up in the title bar), in the description metatag, and in the major headline. Then repeat it several times throughout the page, with an emphasis on repetition near the top of the page. 4. Include outbound links to "authoritative" sites in the subject area you are emphasizing. For instance, if your page is about Golf Travel, a link to a couple large established golf or golf travel sites will help establish the subject matter of your own page. 5. Create content that is unique and that focuses on your subject matter. To carry on with the previous example, if your site is about Golf Travel, you will want to focus on several different areas -- for example Scotland Golf Travel, Ireland Golf Travel, Florida Golf Travel, and so on -- and make the content on each of these pages relevant to the theme of the page. Yes, this seems obvious, but so many websites do not have this kind of obvious focus. 6. Keep your content current and update it regularly. Search engine experts refer to this as "fresh" content. One way to keep adding fresh content is to place an RSS feed from a relevant reputable source on each page. Feeds are often from news sources or blogs, and are often updated on a daily basis. Generally speaking, the more often your content is updated, the more often it will get spidered, and the better it will rank in searches. 7. Get inbound links - Now it is time to get inbound links pointing to your site. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the project, and the one that takes the most time. The search engines consider inbound links an indicator of the importance and relevance of your site. "Relevant" links are the most valuable. These are the ones that come from other sites (or pages) that are closely related to yours. For more advice on how to get quality, relevant inbound links, see Linknet Promotions.
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