What, Why and How of Business Blogs

The What, Why andHow of Business BlogsBy Jason OConnor (c) 2006Oak Web Works, LLC

Blog is short for Web Log or Weblog and the Blogosphere is the online blog world, some parts of which are hyperlinked extensively to each other.
This is the Wikipedia definition: Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.

I recommend that you read lots of people's blogs to learn what blogs are.
Go to your favorite search engine and type in the word 'blog' and the subject you're interested in. For example, 'web design blog', or 'blog music', or 'sports blog'. You'll find lots of blogs that way.

Blogs have become a way in which regular, non-technical people can post information to the Web as easily as they can access it.

Why Are Blogs So Important?
Well, they're not that important, yet. But they could be soon, and most likely will be. In fact, some would argue that they are already vital in today's Web business world. I am not ready to agree to that yet, but it is becoming more obvious to me over time that blogs can no longer be ignored in business.

Online businesses can benefit from blogging by taking advantage of a vehicle for easily posting new, original, and business-related content on a regular basis.

Here Are Some More Business Benefits Of Blogging:
Blogs help to position you and/or your company as experts and leaders in your industry.
They're interactive in nature. At the end of each blog entry is usually a link that allows anyone to add their own comments to your blog entries. This allows your customers and potential customers to make comments about your products or services or ask you questíons to help them in their buying process.
Blogs are marketed easily and quickly by their RSS feeds.
Blogs allow you to stress your choice of products, services, relevant news stories, quotes, pictures and more with your audience, customers and potential customers.
People are generous with adding links to your blog if the content is good, especially within their own blogs. More links means more traffïc and better search engine rankings.

Here Are Some Ways In Which You Can Make Revenue From Your Blog:

1. Selling advertisements. Whether you use banners or text links, if your site draws a regular audience interested in your blog topics or theme, try to offer ad space to organizations that are looking to market to your audience. In fact, if your blogs becomes really popular then advertisers will call you.

2. Offering Google's AdSense. Google's website explains, "Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn monëy." Learn more about AdSense.

3. Affíliate Programs. Affïliate programs allow Web sites that provide links to your site to receive payments or reciprocal advertising in exchange for promoting your Web site. In the case of blogging, this is reversed, where you post links within your blog, and collect monëy from the owners of those links when they result in a click-through and sale.

Here Are Some Websites Where You Can Get Your Blog Listed:
BlogWise
Blog Search Engine
Blog Hub
Blog Daisy
Get Blogs
LS Blogs

How To Blog For Business:
First you need to get blogging software. You can choose to create a blog that is housed on another site such as http://www.blogger.com (which is a blog service) or you can host it on your own Web server. I recommend the latter since the links that are developed by others pointing to your blog won't be counted in the search engines. This is because the links are attributed to domains, so a link to http://MyNewBlog.blogger.com gives a link credít to blogger.com and not your domain.

If your blog is a business blog, you really ought to host your own blog as opposed to using a blog service. You'll need the extra functionality and control.

If you plan on hostíng your own blog and if you plan to use a UNIX Web server platform, then you need to go with blogging software such as Movable Type, for example.
If you have a Microsoft Web server platform for your site, then you'll need software such as BetaParticle blog. Find a great list of various blog software at: http://www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html

Next you'll need a database to hook your blog up to. The database is what stores the blog entries, among other things. If you don't know if you have a database on or connected to your website server, or if you don't know how to hook up your blog to your database, contact your host company or Web server administrator for help.

Once you have the blog set up on your domain (for example http://www.MyWebsite.com/blog) and you've hooked it up to a live database, you can start blogging. Generally, each entry is also a day. So you can write a new entry every day, or whenever you want, and that entry will show up on the blog at the top, moving older entries below.

You ought to think of a theme for your blog. In other words, your blog could be about your personal experiences in the industry you're in. It could be about your company's product reviews, or new services. It could be about your thoughts and opinions about issues related to your industry. It could be a place where you regularly find and list new resources to help others in your industry. The list is endless. But be sure to stick to a theme and be original. You want to offer something of value to your website visitors.

Sticking to a theme helps you position yourself for future advertisers and also makes for better reading for your visitors. Furthermore, you want to give a good impression with your blog with each and every entry if you want it to augment your online business. Finally, sticking to a theme helps with the search engines since it's believed that engines determine website themes and use this information for ranking.

Of course your blog could be about personal things too. Many blogs are just that, an online journal. But since we're interested in Web business here, I am discussing business blogs only.
What's great is that blogs get indexed easily and quickly by search engines. Each entry is another "page" that can be potentially listed in Google for example, which will drive more traffïc to your site.

Another neat thing about running a blog once it's set up is that you do not need to be technical at all to make regular entries. This is helpful if you want to delegate the writing to someone else, since technical skills won't be a prerequisite. This allows you to have the most qualified person regarding the blog's theme and, hopefully the best writer, actually making the entries.

Be creative. Add images to your blog entries to spice things up a bit. Although blogging can be lonely, keep at it.
Sometimes it seems like you're just writing new entries each day for yourself only. It may be a while before someone chooses to add a comment to one of your entries.
You may not hear from anyone for a long time. But that doesn't mean people aren't reading it. In fact, chëck your website statistics to see just how many people are visiting your new blog.
As you add more entries, get your blog listed on other sites and market your blog. It will build, and eventually you'll have a nice following of engaged readers.
Most importantly, be sure to pepper your entries with calls to action. For example, if your business blog is attached to your travel website and the blog's theme is traveling and finding great travel deals all over the world, make sure you add a link to an entry that points people to a travel special you're running on your website.
What would be even better is a blog entry about the fantastic vacation you took to Hawaii and included at the end was a link to cheap Hawaii vacation deals on your website.

About The AuthorJason OConnor is President of Oak Web Works, LLC, an e-strategy firm and enjoys reading Sports, Music & Tickets blog. Reach him at: joconnor888@hotmail.com.

Linking Tricks

Top Dirty Linking Tricks

by Lee Roberts

Part of achieving top search engine positions is through links from other Web pages. These links can come from people who like your site (natural links), reciprocal linking, directory submissions and a few other ways.

The goal of trading links is to get quality links for quality links. True quality links will carry benefits far beyond that of attaining a coveted position in the search engine results. The links will bring traffic from the Web page linking to your Web page. Therefore, you want to ensure you trade or barter links from quality partners.

Sometimes it's hard to determine who is a quality linking partner, even for the expert. So, how can you tell if your link is on a Web page where its value will not be very good?

The short list below highlights ways of diminishing or nullifying the value of a link to your site from another Web page.

Meta Tag Masking - this old trick simply used CGI codes to hide the Meta tags from browsers while allowing search engines to actually see the Meta tags.

Robots Meta Instructions - using noindex and nofollow attributes let's the novice link partner see the visible page with their link while telling the search engines to ignore the page and the links found on the page. Nofollow can be used while allowing the page to be indexed which gives the impression that the search engines will eventually count the link.

Rel=nofollow Attributes - this is not a real attribute based upon HTML standards, but rather it is an attribute approved by the search engines to help identify which links should not be followed. This attribute is often used with blogs to prevent comment and link spam. The link will appear on the Web page and in the search engine's cache, but never be counted.

Dynamic Listing - dynamic listing is a result of having links appear randomly across a series of pages. Each time the link is found on a new page, the search engines count consider the freshness of the link. It is extremely possible that the link won't be on the same page upon the next search engine visitation. So, the link from a partner displaying rotating, dynamic link listings rarely helps.

Floating List - this can be easily missed when checking link partners. Essentially, your link could be number one today, but as new link partners are added your link is moved down the list. This is harmful because the values of the links near the bottom of the list are considered to be of lesser value than the links at the top. With the floating list, it is possible to have your link moved to a new page whose PR value is significantly less or not existent and the new page may not be visited and indexed for months.

Old Cache - the caching date provided by Google indicates the last time the page was cached. Pages with lower PR values tend to be visited and cached less often than pages that have medium to high PR values. If the cache is more than six months old, it can be surmised that Google has little or no desire to revisit the page.

Denver Pages - while Denver, CO is a nice place to visit, Denver Pages are not a place you want to find your link in a trade. Denver Pages typically have a large amount of links grouped into categories on the same page. Some people call this the mile high list. These types of pages do not have any true value in the search engines and are not topically matched to your site.

Muddy Water Pages - these are dangerous and easy to spot. Your link will be piled in with non-topically matched links with no sense of order. It's like someone took all the links and thrown them in the air to see where they land. These are worse than the Denver Pages.

Cloaking - cloaking is the process of providing a page to people while providing a different page to search engines. You could be seeing your link on the Web page, but the search engines could possibly never see the link because they are provided with a different copy. Checking Google's cache is the only way to catch this ploy.

Dancing Robots - this can be easily performed with server-side scripting like PHP and is rarely easy to catch. In this situation people that attempt to view the robots.txt file receive a copy of the robots.txt file that does not include exclusion instructions for the search engines. However, when the search engines request the robots.txt file they receive the exclusion instructions. With this situation the links pages will never be linked and you'll never know why without expert assistance.

Meta Tags and Robots.txt Confusion - which instructions have the most weight? Don't know the answer? Shame. Search engines do. If they conflict the page Meta tags are typically considered the rule to follow.

Link the Head - while these links do not count in the search engines and do not show up on the Web page, they do get counted by scripts or programs designed to verify the links exist. These programs only look for the URL within the source codes for the Web page.

Empty Anchors - this is a nasty trick, but can be an honest mistake. The links exist and are counted by the search engines, but unfortunately are neither visible nor clickable on the Web page. So, there are no traffic values from the link.

The goal of trading links is to trade them for equal value. Understanding the ways people will attempt to prevent passing a quality value from their Web page to your Web page can help you avoid these useless links. If your link partner pulls under-handed tricks the links they trade you are useless.

While you may never be an expert in knowing all the latest tricks, traps and tests, you can now become an expert in knowing the thirteen mentioned above. Ensuring your link partners are not following or using these tactics can help improve the quality of links you gain from other Web pages. By having quality links pointing to your Web page will you gain additional traffic through organic search engine results and visitors driven directly from your linking partners.

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To get back links into your blog or site

I often get asked my opinion on what the number one way to get back links to your blog or website is. I reply by telling them that the best way is to use different methods. I know this is a bit of a cop-out. People tell me, "But which one should I start with?" "What method should I use if I only have time for one?"I'm going to go into detail about what I would use if I could only use one method and needed the best results possible. I'll then give you tips on using this strategy to the greatest effect.So what's my number one way to generate a ton of back links?Article SubmissionSo why is it article submission with all the software out there? There are many reasons and here they are:

1) Some software maybe able to get more back links faster but if I chose one this would be it because it will last a long time. This is something that has worked for years and will continue to work. Your back links will also stay active a long time.

2) It's good for both short term and long term results. Your articles will be indexed quickly giving back links with 24-48 hours and they will have a viral effect building over time.

3) It's ethical. This method it great for everyone because some people don't want to use software that may upset other people and that's fine. This method will not get anyone mad with you.

4) You can outsource the hard part. The worst part about submitting articles is writing them. You can outsource article writing for anywhere as low as three bucks per article and defiantly no more than $5 per article making your life a lot easier.Now you know that this is the method you should be starting to use today, let's talk about the techniques to use in order to get the best results:
A) An article only needs to be 300 – 400 words. If you write an article of 600 words split it into two parts as this will then get you extra back links with the directories.
B) Make sure you use your keywords in your anchor text. This is very important to get targeted traffic from search engines.
C) Use at least two links in each article. Some directories only allow two links but most will allow three or more. If you're linking to just one blog or site use two links with different anchor text. You could also link to two different sites or blogs using one article.
D) You can change words and parts of an article to make it into many articles. I use this strategy myself and when outsourcing article writing. The article has the same information but said a little different. This will give you more articles to submit and can also get you lower prices on outsourcing because there research has already been done.
E) Create spare general blogs and place the articles on those blogs. I have quite a few spare blogs I use just to get quick back links.
Set blogs up today and interlink them all.
Get them indexed and then you can get quick back links to a new blog or site within 48 hours.Now you have this advice you should be able to start writing or outsourcing articles and then submitting them to the main directories already discussed and even more using software.

You could also you Article Assistance like me to get them on many websites.
For more information on Article Assistance please click below.http://www.articleassistance.com/ Thanks for readingRobPS.
If you have any questions that could be answered by a report or newsletter please email me as I would love to hear from you.Thank you for reading this email,from United Kingdom

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Here is another one:

My advice is to create incoming links that point to the internal pages of your web site.
Here is an article on how to build incoming links: http://webrankingconsultants.com/seo-tu … -site.html

Blogging to the Bank :)

A very useful tool, with great view inside the adventure of Google :) This will help me a lot !
http://www.bloggingtothebank.com/?hop=lilleba1

How to get links from gov. sites with high Page Rank

How to get links from .gov sites with high PageRank
There's a new trick that some webmasters use to get high rankings on Google. Just like the trick we mentioned in a previous issue of our newsletter, this new technique exploits security holes of other web sites.

A new bad trick to get higher Google rankings

Some webmasters have discovered a new trick to get inbound links from authority web sites. At the moment, it seems to be possible to improve your Google rankings with that trick.

Read more here:
http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter179.htm#facts