SEO Dance

A lot of bloggers seem to do most of the blogging during the week and take the weekend off. While I agree we all need a break from work, a new blog post on a Saturday, Sunday or both can help build traffic.

It makes sense that more people spend some of their weekend playing on the computer. For many, visiting blogs is relaxing and fun. If your blog has new content posted that day, it seems fresher than posts that are just one day old. I recently had a weekend where I was actually caught up on offline activities and was able to make a few posts to my blogs. I not only saw better stats but actually had comments on the posts. I learned something that weekend and that is to always stride to post at least once a weekend.

Even if you don’t want to blog on the weekend, do an extra post and adjust the timestamp to go live on the weekend. Check your stats to see if the extra effort is worth it.

One of the benefits to paid blogging that some paid companies boast is that it can increase traffic to your blog. Does paid blogging increase traffic?

Paid blogging can help to gain exposure to blog through your blog possibly showing up in different search results. Because paid blogging opportunities might have you blogging about something that you normally don’t talk about, it can open up your blog to now be a part of search results of those new keywords.

Becoming a part of the paid blogging community can help to gain exposure for your blog. Other bloggers are willing to do link exchanges and will usually check out other paid bloggers’ blogs. Forums are a good way to find other paid bloggers and also to do blog searches for the same opportunities that you have taken. Bloggers are also very forthcoming with what helped build up their traffic.

Paid blogging might increase your traffic or it might not. It seems to increase traffic over proven ways that really have nothing to do with the paid posts. Being a part of a community forum, visiting other blogs, and taking part in link exchanges are all steps you can take without doing paid posts. Do paid posts actually drive traffic? Probably just as much as any other blog post on your blog.

Another way to make money with your blog is through contextual advertising. This system works through a third party and usually involves adding code to your blog. The system scans your content for keywords, then makes those keywords links to vendors who have bought that keyword from them.

Contextual advertising blends into the flow of your blog. No need to blog about a product or a service, just blog as normal and let the contextual ads fall where they may. Contextual ads usually stand out on a page by being double underlined. Sometimes a rollover the words will create a box that has a snapshot of the website or products related to the word. It just depends on the contextual program as to which one appears.

With contextual advertising programs, a blog must meet certain criteria and have high traffic. It only makes sense about traffic since the more visitors a site has, the more likely someone will find the ad interesting. Some contextual ad companies have begun to offer a hybrid program where you link to a keyword in your blog post. The blog post can be on any topic as long as the keyword with link is listed in the post.

Contextual ads can fit into blogs nice and easy. Some readers may possibly be turned off from advertising on a blog. Ultimately it is up to the blogger to decide which, if any, venues to making money with their blog is right for them.

Products and services that people are talking about usually seem to do better in the marketplace. That seems to be the theory behind buzz marketing as it relates to paid blog posting. Some advertisers who paid for blog postings are looking to create buzz about their product or service through the blogosphere. Paid posts have become another marketing tool for those wishing to get their product or service noticed.

PayPerPost is one of the original paid blogging services on the Internet. Thousands of bloggers and advertisers have signed up with the program. Blog offers are set at a minimum of $5 but can go much higher. It’s hard to measure if the post do actually influence or create buzz. Advertisers can track hits to keep up with traffic generated from blog postings. PayPerPost is notorious for creating buzz around their brand by offering high paying opps about their own company and running contests open to their bloggers. PayPerPost also likes to keep PayPerPost naysayers with plenty of material to blog about on their own popular blogs by giving interviews or giving PPP news to them first before publicly released.

Blogitive is another paid blogging service that looks to generate buzz for their clients. Each opportunity has a web release that the blogger uses to craft their blog post. Payout for each opportunity is a flat $5.

Another up and coming service is Blogsvertise that assigns offers to bloggers who can then either accept or decline an offer. Payment varies from client to client.

Creamaid looks to create buzz but through a different approach. Unlike the other paid blogging services, there is no registration involved. Creamaid calls their opportunities “conversations.” You just find a topic that you like and follow the link to a blogger’s post. Then click on the widget inside the post to get in on the conversation. A message will appear if all the slots have been filled for that conversation. Pay is low but taking part in conversations can help to boost traffic since your blog post will be a listed in the appropriate widget.

LoudLaunch offers a list of campaigns for bloggers who can then choose which ones they want to complete. Pay varies and depends upon your blog’s ranking.

Paid buzz marketing might seem an oxymoron but it must be working on some level to keep going. Next up I’ll look at contextual advertising for your blog.

There are several venues that bloggers can pursue to make money by using their blog. Some programs even claim that they can help drive traffic to your blog and help with PageRank. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting different ways bloggers are making money with their blogs. One of the ways many bloggers are making money with their blogs is through paid reviews.

ReviewMe is one paid review service that allows bloggers to sign up and add up to six blogs to their system. Bloggers set the price for a review on their blog. Advertisers can search through blog listings and purchase blog reviews. Bloggers can either accept or decline the offer. If accepted, the blogger typically has at least 3 days to complete the review. ReviewMe requires disclosure, so on each review there should be a sentence like “This is a sponsored post.”

Another service that is a little different in structure is Sponsored Reviews. Bloggers review advertisers offerings and then place a bid on the project. The advertiser can then either accept, decline or make a counter offer. Advertisers set a price range for bids. The blogger can only bid as much as they have set their maximum for their blog, which Sponsored Reviews will give an estimate. Sponsored Reviews also requires disclosure.

There are many other paid blogging services on the Internet. While some do offer reviews as an option, I will discuss them in under the main topic that they belong in. While some readers accept paid posts as advertising and a way for the blogger to make money, some readers aren’t as forgiving of the intrusion of the paid posts. It’s important when doing a paid review that the content is a nice fit for the subject of your blog.

Paid reviews has its pros and cons. The extra income it can generate is surely appreciated by many but can possibly hurt the integrity of a blog. Be upfront with your readers about paid reviews and give honest reviews of products or services. Up next I’ll tell you about more paid blogging for creating buzz in the blogosphere.

We all know the value of keywords when it comes to search engine traffic. Working keywords into content can be a bit tricky and somewhat awkward. Taking care to write for your readership first will not only produce natural written content but will help determine which keywords really belong in the article.

My writing process begins with writing down my thoughts and ideas in no particular order. It’s almost an outline but it is too chaotic to be called something so structured. Once I have my typed my initial thoughts on a subject, I go back to group like-minded thoughts together. Then I read through it and add more thoughts. Finally I do a final read and spell check.

At this stage of my writing is when I begin to think about what my content is all about and how to optimize it. Usually I will find that some keywords are staring back at me or with a little editing I can get my keywords into my writing without trying too hard.

When writing is organic, it flows better and is much more enjoyable for the reader. Writing first, then optimizing the writing for the web makes a better article for the reader. It’s one thing for a reader to find you through a search engine but it’s another to maintain that reader. Writing first and foremost your thoughts then analyzing it for ways to inject keywords will mean a better experience for your audience.

Some of search engine news making headlines this week ending June 23rd.

Comscore.com releases U.S. search engine rankings for May 2007. Google gains ground while Yahoo! stays the same.

Google partners will Dell to make their Google search engine appliance. The rack-mounted yellow server uses Google algorithms to index a company’s entire infrastructure. Google says that pay having Dell build the appliance will allow Google to focus more on the software.

Microsoft to tweak Vista’s search after complaints filed by Google claim the program slows down competing desktop search engine programs.

eBay is once again buying Google ads after a dispute between the two Internet giants over Google’s plan to throw a protest party because eBay doesn’t allow Google checkout to pay for auctions.

Web Targeted, a Utah SEO firm, has a new home at SEO.com. The new domain wasn’t cheap. The purchase price was $5 million. Dave Bascom leads Web Targeted and has been reported as believing this domain name will help to give his company an edge in the fiercely competitive world of search engine optimization services.

There is no doubt that some web surfers looking to learn more about search engine optimization will blindly type in SEO.com. A great domain name is only a part of the equation to garner a true web presence. It’ll be interesting to see if the high ticket priced domain actually pays off for the company.

Anchor text is the words that are used to link to web pages. Anchor text is very important and plays an integral part in Google’s search rankings. Having several keyword backlinks can better your search engine result placement for those keywords. Search engines, especially Google, put a lot of weight on anchor text.

Through Google’s webmaster tools you can discover keywords used in external links to their website. This can be helpful to learn how your website is perceived by those linking to it. From the Google webmaster dashboard, click statistics then page analysis to learn about external links to your website. This can help to know which keywords are already used to link to your site.

It’s good to know where your website stands when it comes to external links and the keywords used for those links. The information can be very helpful when building an SEO campaign.

anchor text, anchor tag

I write for a very popular women’s website, and I often get comment submissions from webmasters asking me to link to their website. These requests I usually don’t respond or give a link to. Why? The reason is usually it isn’t a quality website. Also in the request is never an offer to link back.

When approaching a webmaster about a link, make sure to offer to include a link back to their website. I like to do link exchanges with websites that are along the same subject. That way when a reader clicks on the link, it might be of interest.

When doing a link exchange, find out exactly where the link will be placed. Some websites seem to hide their links inside their webpages. The webmaster may even have a directory where he puts link exchanges.

While links to your website can help increase PageRank and search engine placement, links from relevant websites can boost traffic, too.

Recently I learned about Google’s Supplemental Index. It’s web pages that are excluded from Google’s search engine. The main reason a web page seems to land in the index is because it is duplicate content. Using the SEO Tool for Firefox, I found out how many of my pages were in the supplemental index. For one of my websites that is a blog using WordPress, I had 2400 pages indexed and 2300 in the supplemental index.

I checked a couple of results pages to see which pages were in the supplemental index. Most seemed to be either comments or RSS content. Apparently WordPress creates a bunch of duplicate content by its structure. Having a post in two categories can possibly create duplicate content. To fix this problem, I added a robots.txt file to my root directory. My first robots.txt was apparently too restrictive and blocked a lot of pages from Google. My Google traffic was nonexistent for about two weeks. It needs some tweaking before I add it back again.

The supplemental index pages do not count against you when it comes to PageRank. The pages listed in the supplemental index will not be found in Google searches. Most of the pages for my website in the supplemental index don’t have much value anyway since most are comments or feed results. It would just be nice to get that large supplemental number to a much smaller one.

A new study concludes that search engines do not give the same top search results. The study spearheaded by Dogpile.com searched Yahoo, Google, Windows Live, and Ask with 19,332 queries. The top search result was the same in only 3.9% of the searches. A similar study conducted two years ago showed that the four search engines agreed 7% of all queries.

It’s just a reminder that when searching the Internet, diversify your searches for a broader results.

I was doing a little You Tube digging when I came across this commercial for Japanese search engine Goo. It shows how their search engine results are really found. If only Google was so open.

Here are a few stories making the news this week. Google makes news on a couple of fronts and another search engine prepares to launch.

Google responds to privacy concerns. Google was recently rated “worse on the web” when it comes to their privacy policy. Google has sent a letter to the group addressing their concerns. One of the concerns was the amount of time Google keeps search engine reports. Google officials say that they are working on to implement that after 18 months the collected data will be stripped of any compromising information.

Powerset to launch a natural language search engine. Startup Powerset’s natural language search engine looks to make keyword searches a thing of the past. Powerset will let users type in a sentence or thought into the search engine and return results based on that. Powerset hasn’t launched yet but people can sign up to be notified when they do launch as well as get a sneak peek at the service.

eBay pulls ads from Google. eBay, outraged over Google’s plan to throw a party in Boston for eBay auctioneers and buyers, pulled their ads from the search engine giant. The party was supposed to be a protest of sorts since eBay doesn’t offer Google Checkout as one of the payment options. eBay owns PayPal, the checkout service they do offer. Google has since apologized for the debacle. eBay hasn’t yet put their ads back on Google.

Search engine ads are projected to lose market share within five years. An interesting article that says more advertisers are preferring video ads.

Mahalo, the human powered search engine, is looking for savvy part-time researchers. The Greenhouse program will pay users to research a result page. Candidates who qualify for the Greenhouse program will be paid between $10-$15 for each search result. The ideal candidates will have experience with Wikipedia or other social media website.

The Mahalo team consists of 40 full-time editors who will oversee the search results submitted from the Greenhouse researchers. Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis reports that over 4,000 search results have been covered and that another 500 are added weekly.

To apply to become a part-time guide, fill out the Greenhouse application form at Mahalo.com.