Lots of folks talk about search and never delve into the content network. In the search network you choose keywords based on which ads will be shown in search results. In contrast with the content network, you choose locations, ie, web-sites and individual pages within those sites, where you would like to see your ad.

The content network is the set of sites, blogs and other web products that networks like Google and Yahoo push to publishers that have agreed to publish ads in exchange for a fee per click through an advertising program.

The owner of the website which publishes the ads chooses one or more locations where they will appear, and receives a commission for each click received. The first thing to understand is that, unlike search engine searches and resulting ads, advertisements in the content network are not geared for keywords, but by the content of websites that they occur.

David Szetela’s new book Customers Now: Profiting From the New Frontier of Content Based Internet Advertising shows exactly how to use the networks, set up ads and optimize the platforms for better ROI. Googles content network and  ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ Exchange is also reviewed but does not have the reach of Yahoo or Googles network.

What is a feed?
Feeds, also known as RSS feeds, XML feeds, syndicated content, or web feeds, contain frequently updated content published by a website. They are usually used for news and blog websites, but are also used for distributing other types of digital content, including pictures, audio, or video. Feeds can also be used to deliver audio content (usually in MP3 format) which you can listen to on your computer or MP3 player. This is referred to as podcasting.

How do I view a feed?
When you visit a webpage, the Feeds button Picture of the Feeds button will change color, letting you know that feeds are available. Click the Feeds button, and then click the feed you want to see. To get content automatically, you should subscribe to a feed. For more information on Web Slices, see Web Slices: frequently asked questions.

How do I subscribe to a feed?

1.      Open Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari or Chrome Feedburner or Google reader
2.      Go to the website that has the feed you want to subscribe to.
3.      Click the Feeds button Picture of the Feeds button to discover feeds on the webpage.
4.      Click a feed (if more than one is available). If only one feed is available, you will go directly to that page.
5.      Click Subscribe to this Feed.
6.      Type a name for the feed and select the folder to create the feed in.
7.      Click Subscribe.

How does a feed differ from a website?
A feed can have the same content as a webpage, but it’s often formatted differently. When you subscribe, the web broswer automatically checks the website and downloads new content so you can see what is new since you last visited the feed.

Does a feed subscription cost money?
No, it’s usually free to subscribe to a feed.

How can I view my subscribed feeds?
You view feeds on the Feeds tab in the Favorites Center. To view your feeds in Internet Explorer 8, click the Favorites button, and then click Feeds.

Can other programs display my subscribed feeds?

Top Picks

Web: Bloglines Simple two-pane interface, like email.

Mac OS X: NetNewsWire This elegant Mac-like aggregator is easy to use and powerful.

Windows: SharpReader Simple, but gets the job done.

Linux: Liferea A simple Gtk newsreader.

Runners-Up

AmphetaDesk A news aggregator you access through a web browser. (Mac/Win/Linux)

FeedDemon A more complicated aggregator for Windows. (Win)

FeedReader Like SharpReader, but sporadically updated. (Win)

NewsGator Read the news from within Microsoft Outlook. (Win)

NewsWatcher Based on Scopeware technology. (Win)

News Is Free Lets you create your own customized news page with feeds from the sites you’re interested in. (Web)

Novobot A smart headline viewer and news ticker that can also process almost any website. (Win)

Radio UserLand A full-stregth news-reading application, on your desktop. (Mac/Win)

rss2email Reads RSS feeds and sends each new item to you as an email. (Unix)

Straw The GNOME news aggregator.

dynamicobjects spaces Displays RSS feeds in an Outlook-like interface. (Mac/Win/Lin)

What does RSS mean?
The acronym RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is used to describe the technology used in creating feeds.

What formats do feeds come in?
The most common formats are RSS and Atom. Feed formats are constantly being updated with new versions. Most Browsers supports RSS 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0, and ATOM .3, 1.0 . All web feed formats are based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), a text-based computer language used to describe and distribute structured data and documents.

It has been discussed in the blogosphere, on a study by SEOmoz, which indicates on more weight factors in the positioning of a site.

here the list (copied) for you to see:

1. Using keyword in the Title (4.9)
2. Popularity (link) a global Web (4.5)
3. Anchor Text of backlinks (4.4)
4. Internal structure of the links (4.1)
5. Age of a Web (4)
6. Thematic list of the web / pages linking you regarding your keyword (3.9)
7. Popularity (links) on a page within the community theme (3.9)
8. Using keywords in the page (3.9)
9. Popularity (links) global page / site that links you (3.7)
10. Thematic list of pages that you link (3.6)

Of all the changes, I would rescue one of the differences that make them among the same study but on different dates, one in 2005 and the other for 2007, called Global Link Popularity (translate as the popularity of links Global).

Overall, it appears that the “external” factors such as the popularity of sites with general issues, are having a lot of market acceptance and in turn, achieving good positions in the lists of results within the major Search engines .

This differs with what by 2005 was considered one of the factors positioning very important to have a site of some very specific topic and expect some important position.

From an SEO standpoint, this situation fills me “hypothesis head”, especially when I think of those websites that nature can not take more than a certain level of content.

That is, small Web sites that compete fairly competitive markets, will now have to expand its niche in a certain way, and make your Web site a valuable source of information in a generic way rather than in detail.

In a way, this can contribute directly to offer Web sites with relevant content and make the user experience more rewarding. But they also require a change of mindset focused on building better websites, “open horizon” to contribute to positioning and expect positive results.

What’s a favicon?

A favicon (favorites icon) is an icon associated with a blog/site. Most popular browsers display favicons as 16×16 pixel icons next to the URL in the address bar, next to the title in tabs, and next to the title as well in bookmarks.

How to create a favicon?

Create a 16×16 pixel icon using a graphics editor . Save it as favicon.ico or save it in another format and use an online favicon generator to do the conversion to .ico.

Links that might be useful:

• How to Create a Favicon in Photoshop
• Favicon Converter | Favicon Converter 2 | Favicon Converter 3
  
• Favicon Maker | Favicon Maker 2 | Favicon Maker 3
  

Need graphic insperation or help?

• 50 Remarkable Favicons by Smashing Magazine
• Favourite Favicons by Daniel Burka
• The Favicon Gallery
• Favicons of the Top WordPress-Related Blogs

How to add it to your blog?

Once you have your favicon ready, place it in the root directory. Most popular browsers will automatically detect and use the favicon.

For better results, add the following line to the header.php file of your theme, between the <head> and </head> tags:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”wp-content/themes/current_theme/favicon.ico” />

*change ‘current_theme’ to the name of the theme that you are currently using

You’ve just added a Favicon to your blog!

1. Basic technical optimization

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there’s a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.

1.1. Permalinks

The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.6.1, you’ll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=<postid>, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the “custom” setting into /%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to /%category%/%postname%/.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to install the Redirection plugin, and make sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, the setting “Create 301 when post slug changes” is enabled. Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO’d permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.

WWW vs non-WWW
Another good thing to configure now you’re on that screen anyway is the Root domain: Add WWW / Strip WWW one. Make a choice, and set it here, don’t enable both, some search engines still can’t handle that. And enable the redirect index.php/index.html one too, it won’t hurt you, and might even do your WordPress SEO some good.

URL stopwords
The last thing you’ll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is install the SEO Slugs plugin, this will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won’t get those ugly long URL’s when you do a sentence style post title.

1.2. Optimize your Titles for SEO

By default, the title for your blog posts is “Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title”. For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:

• Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
• People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

For more info on how to craft good titles for your posts, see this excellent article and video by Aaron Wall: Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles. I prefer to do this with HeadSpace, as that makes it very very easy. You should check your header.php though, and make sure that the code for wp_title(); contains two quotes, so it looks like this: wp_title('');. This makes sure you have absolute control over the title and don’t have any annoying separator in there.

After that, go into the HeadSpace settings, and make them look something like this for your posts and pages:

For the other pages, I have the following settings:

• Posts / Pages: %%title%% - Blog Title
• Categories: %%category%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Tags: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Archives: Blog Archives %%page%% - Blog Title

With HeadSpace, you can also write optimized titles for each post specifically, overriding the settings here. This way you have absolute control over your titles, and can make sure your WordPress titles are actually helping your SEO. I like Al in one SEO too!

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

Give each category a decent description, and use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that you actually want to rank with. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what’s in the page they’re clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.

Automated descriptions
In my opinion, auto generating descriptions is a load of bull, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you’re thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet… If you don’t use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.

Auto generating a snippet is a “shortcut”, and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).

1.4. Optimize the More text

Another neat featuer of HeadSpace is that you can use it to optimize the more text, so if you use a more tag on the frontpage, you can replace the default “Read more” link with something meaningful for every post. It’s small things like that that make your WordPress SEO the best.

1.5. Image Optimization

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you’re helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what’s otherwise hidden to them.

You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don’t have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image’s alt and title tag:

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

You’ll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO”. They are good for two things:

• They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
• They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt single.php and page.php in your theme, and use one of the available breadcrumb plugins.

2.2. Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an <h1>, and nothing else. Your blog’s name should only be an <h1> on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an <h3>.

These are easy to edit in the post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they’re not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don’t have to download them most of the time.

2.4. Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

1. Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I’ve highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
2. Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend WP-Super-Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.

Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I myself have a MediaTemple grid server, with a LITE MySQL container added to that.

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you’re not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you’re allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.

The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren’t necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren’t helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you’d only want on sub pages.

Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

Once you’ve done all the basic stuff, you’ll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:

1. date based
2. category based
3. tag based

Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author/<author-name>/, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs.

In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages outside of the single page where it should be available. We’re going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things.

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

Install Yoasts robots meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all archive pages, like this:

Now the search engine will follow all the links on these archive pages, but it won’t show those pages in the index. Not everybody will agree on this policy, and others will tell you to just show a snippet of each post on the archive page. That will also work, but in my opinion completely throwing them out is better.

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don’t think you need author archives, use the robots-meta plugin to disable the author archives. Also, if you don’t think you need a date based archive: disable it. Even if you’re not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO…

3.3. Pagination

Thirdly, you’ll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts…

There’s an easy fix. Jaimie Sirovich wrote Pagerfix, a plugin that helps you make your pagination look like this:

To reach that, install that plugin, and change this section in f.i. your index.php:

<div class="navigation">
  <div class="alignleft">
    <?php next_posts_link('« Older Entries') ?>
  </div>
  <div class="alignright">
    <?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries »') ?>
  </div>
</div>

Into this:

<div class="navigation">
  <?php
    pager_fix(" "," "," ","« Previous page","Next Page »","strong");
  ?>
</div>

Do that in your index.php, your archives.php, and all other archive templates you might have.

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You’ll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand. If you’re using the meta widget, you might want to enable the option in robots meta to replace that with one that has nofollowed links.

4. Altering your blog’s structure for high rankings

Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They’re diluted by one simple thing: comments.

4.1. Pages instead of posts

You’ve probably noticed by now, or you’re seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually… not a post. It’s a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a “daughter”-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that’s where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.

That’s why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you’ve changed.

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

• create a new page with updated and improved content
• change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
• publish the new page under the old post’s URL, or redirect the old post’s URL to the new URL
• send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you’ve updated and improved on your old post
• wait for the links to come in, again;
• rank even higher for your desired term as you’ve now got:
  • more control over the keyword density
  • even more links pointing at the article
  • the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it’s content and ranking

Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you’d lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone’s benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that’s exactly what you got!

4.3. Linking to related posts

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.

There’s a load of these available, but I just use the one that comes with the Simple Tags plugin, as I’ve found that the easiest and best one so far.

5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!

A lot of bloggers still think that because their blog is a blog, they don’t have to optimize anything. Wrong. To get people to link to you, they have to read your blog. And what do you think is easier: getting someone who is already visiting your blog to visit regularly and then link to your blog, or getting someone who visits your blog for the first time to link to your blog immediately? Right.

Conversion optimization is so vitally important to bloggers as well: they need to learn how to test their call to actions on their blog so that more people will subscribe, either by e-mail or by RSS. (Ow btw, if you haven’t subscribed to this blog yet, do it now!)

One of the things I’ve found to be very important, and more bloggers seem to have found this, is that a BIG RSS subscribe button is very important, as is offering a way to subscribe by e-mail. I even offer daily and weekly e-mail subscribe options, using aweber (aff), and have found that people tend to really like those options too.

Another thing to be very aware of is when people might want to subscribe to your blog. If they’ve just finished reading an article of yours, and really liked it, that would be the ideal time to reach them, right? That’s why more and more people are adding lines like this to the end of their posts: “Liked this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!”

Another great time to get people to subscribe is when people have just commented on your blog for the first time, for which purpose I use the awesome comment relish plugin. Which leads me to the next major aspect of WordPress SEO:

6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved

Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogs. As Wikipedia states:

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Comments are not only nice because people tell you how special you are, or that you made a mistake, or whatever else they have to tell you. Most of all they’re nice, because they show engagement. And engagement is one of the most important factors of getting people to link to you: they show you they care, and they open the conversation, now all you have to do is respond, and you’re building a relationship!

6.1. How should you get people to comment

The easiest way of getting people to do anything is: ask them to do it. Write in an engaging style, and then ask your blog’s readers for an opinion, their take on the story etc.

Another important things is your comment links. Is your comment link “No comments »”? Or is it “No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome »”? Feel the difference? You can change this by opening your index.php template, search for comments_popup_link() and changing the texts within that function.

6.2. Bond with your commenters

Another thing to do is thank people when they’ve commented on your weblog. Not every time, because that get’s annoying, but doing it the first time is a very good idea.

Justin Shattuck thought the same, and created the Comment Relish plugin, which I just mentiond, which sends an email after someone has made his first comment. This email is a message you can enter yourself, with for instance your feed URL, and in my case, a newsletter subscribe URL, etc.

Another option, which is a bit less obtrusive / spammy, is to install my comment redirect plugin. This plugin allows you to redirect people who have made their first comment to a specific “thank you” page.

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

Now that people have joined the conversation on your blog, you should make sure they stay in the conversation. That’s why you should install the subscribe to comments plugin, that allows people to subscribe to a comment thread just like they would in a forum, and sends them an e-mail on each new comment. This way, you can keep the conversation going, and maybe your readers will be giving you new angles for new posts.

7. Off site blog SEO

If you’ve followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you’ve got a big chance of becoming successfull, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn’t. Go out there, and talk to people online.

7.1 Follow your commenters

There’s been a movement on the web for a while now that’s called the “You comment – I follow“. They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to “reward” your visitors. Now I do agree, but… That get’s you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog… What I do advocate though, is that you actually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.

If you think that’s a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That’s a group of people you have to take care of!

7.2 Use Twitter

Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the “cool” people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.

To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.

7.3 Find related blogs, and work them

If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you’ll need to rank is to be a part of the community.

SMO, or Social Media Optimization, helps build website traffic by using social media based websites. The dawning of web 2.0 has seen many different social media websites crop up in an equally large number of different guises. Content sharing, social bookmarking, and collaborative websites form the basis of this initiative and it is these types of website that you need to use in order to leverage the power of the social web.

I recently started using twitter and realized that setting up accounts with keywords was a brilliant way to lock out my competition in certain verticals. The next part of the equation was how to monetize the twitter account.

* Direct Advertisement – If a lot of people are following you in ‘twitter’ or in other words if you have a ‘wide reach’ to a large number of twitter users, you can look into direct advertisements for monetization.

* Recommendation – You can recommend a particular product or service on behalf of your advertisers & peruse your followers to take an ‘action’.

* Promotion – You can help your advertiser to promote a new product or service to your twitter followers. I have found a huge increase in my Google analytics where twitter is the referring site.

Twitter works like niche marketing, if you are an Internet Marketer, most of your followers in Twitter are probably from the same sphere of influence which is why they have ‘followed’ you in the first place.

# Affiliate Marketing – I was listening to Shoemoney’s podcast from webmasterradio.fm where he talked about how affiliate marketing can actually be blended within Twitter.

* Affiliate Links – If you are recommending a product or a service to your followers, you can always embed your affiliate link in your tweet. (e.g. Using a service like TinyUrl.com)

* Sales Pages – Instead of taking your followers to another website using your affiliate link, you might just want to promote your own product & services and sell them directly via your sales / landing page.

# Paid Review– This is pretty much like the direct advertisement, however the only difference would be, instead of blindly suggesting a product or a service to someone, you can actually do some ‘paid reviews’. Similar to Blogvertise and other paid inclusion sites.

* Product – Paid review about a particular product (e.g. Internet Marketing software)
* Services – Paid review on services that your advertiser offers. (E.g. Mortgage, Auto, pick any affiliate niche)
* People – Paid review about people. You can review someone’s web design skills, or you may promote someone’s ‘twitter’ account for instance.

# Sponsored Contest– An advertiser may want to run a contest via a popular twitter user to get feedback about his product & services or just to create some brand awareness. (gearing up to the buzz marketing campaign)

* Feedback – Example – “What New features would you like to see in Product A”?
* Brand Awareness– Example- “Describe product X in 140 Characters” or “Tell us why you like product X within 140 Characters”. The best answer can be given a cool prize sponsored by the advertiser.

On-Page Optimization –

· Content Optimization

· Keyword Placement (Frequency, Density, Proximity, etc.)

· Title Tag Optimization

· Meta Tag Optimization

· Spider/Robot Tag Optimization

· Image Alt Optimization

· Internal Link Structure

· 301 Redirects

· Robot.txt Creation

· Broken Links & Page Optimization

· Site Mapping

· Avoiding Specific Design Optimization Issues (Graphic, Flash, Dynamic, Frameset, and Javascript only Sites)

Off-Page Optimization –

· Link Building (One Way and Reciprocal Links)

· Link Baiting (Luring others to want to link to your website)

· Article Submissions

· Press Release Submission

· Directory Submissions

· Search Engine Submission

· Sitemap Submissions

 Social Marketing items such as:

· Social bookmarking

· Optimizing Web 2.0 properties such as Digg, Youtube, Hubpages, Zimbio, Facebook, Myspace, etc.

· Blogging

· Content Building

· Article & Press Release Submissions

If you already have your own blog, or are thinking of setting one up, you’ve undoubtedly read one or more of the beginner’s guides to blogging that frequent the Internet. Blog often and provide unique, fresh, entertaining, accurate, and relevant information. That’s the content of virtually all of those articles, but this information is only going to get you so far.

The information they provide will help you drive traffic to your blog, as long as you stick at it, and some of the more in depth articles may even give you a basic shove in the right gold paved direction. However, there will come a time when you’re ready to take your blog to the next level.

WordPress And Why We Believe It’s Essential For A Successful Blog

First off, I feel this has to be said – if you’re not using WordPress then it’s highly likely that you’re missing out. WordPress has the biggest collection of plug-ins, themes, and other features of any blogging platform and, of course, it’s free. Rather than spend money on using another blogging platform, save your dollars to pay for a custom design or get help with marketing.

What Plug-ins Do For You

Plug-in’s represent the greatest time saving addition to your blog, as well as the greatest opportunity to add increased features and functions that will help you take your blog to the next level. To really succeed in blogging for money, you need to start treating your blog like any website owner treats their website. This means you have to look at it like a business.

A Small Selection Of Top Notch Plug-in’s

WordPress plugins offer a huge range of different functions and features that you couldn’t otherwise obtain. We’ve listed a few of what we believe to be the more important here but there are many others:

Google Sitemaps – The Google Sitemaps plugin automatically creates an XML sitemap, which can be submitted to many of the major search engines. It will also automatically inform them (ping) when you add any new posts or pages to your blog.

Firestats – There are several in-depth stat packages available as plugins but our personal favorite is the Firestats package. It is crucial that you track and act on the stats for your website. Knowing how your readers found your site can help you with promotion and improve your profit levels by giving you a clearer picture of exactly what your visitors are looking for. It’s also good to know the topics that are working out and those that aren’t.

Social Bookmarking – The social bookmarking plugin adds the links to the bottom of your posts that lets readers quickly and conveniently bookmark a post with their preferred social bookmarking site. Some of these sites can help you generate traffic and even improve your search ranking.



All In One SEO – The All In One SEO plugin enables you to add a title, description, and keywords to each of your posts. These can help improve search engine results and make your posts appear cleaner in the search results. It can also be used to ensure that visitors are highly targeted.

Related Entries – It’s important to get traffic flowing around your posts because the more of your site a person views, the more likely they will be to click affiliate links or Adsense links. If your blog is entirely related to your business, they will be more likely to buy your products or pay for your services.

Adsense Deluxe – Don’t let the name fool you. Adsense Deluxe provides a fast and efficient method of adding Adsense code to any post or page, with just a single tag, but it also does the same for Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads.

Comment Subscription – The big benefit of a blog is that you can often persuade interested visitors to keep returning to your corner of the net. The comment subscription plug in further enables them to sign up and be notified of any responses to comments they have added.

Monetizing Your Blog

If you want to make money from your blog and you have a reasonable amount of traffic then the methods of advertising you use will quickly become an important topic to you. There are a lot of different ways to monetize a blog, and it would be damaging of me to try and tell you exactly what method will work without knowing at least a little about your blog. However, there are some things we will willingly share.

Don’t Sell Out – There’s a temptation for those with more mature blogs to write a post and review an item, website, or service and get paid for doing so. Our opinion on this can be summed up in pretty much one word or two; “don’t” or “do not”. You might think that you can write a genuinely informative piece and be completely open and honest without your readers ever realizing what you are doing but it is highly unlikely that this is the case.

Sponsorship – Sponsored advertising is a great way to monetize some blogs. Generally speaking (and there are exceptions), the more specific the topic of a blog, the more likely this will prove to be a viable advertising solution and it may be easier to bag sponsored ads than you think. And, because this is WordPress, there are plugins that help you do it too (AdServe is a good one).

Affiliate Data Feeds – Most affiliate networks have some form of data feed or affiliate feed. If you intend to promote affiliate programs then make the most of these, but ensure that the feed fits with your site. Don’t just slap up a bit of code and expect it to miraculously turn your hobby blog into a multi-million dollar, award winning blog because it takes careful planning, ad placement optimization, and some trial and error to get the best results. Guess what? There are numerous plugins to use with the Amazon affiliate program and other programs so make the most of them.

Blog Networks

The final point we’re going to cover in this, now extensive, article is whether or not you should join a blog network. A blog network is, unsurprisingly, a network of blogs. The overall aim and the method that connects the blogs differs with each network. Some may be connected by having different subdomains on the same main domain. Others may simply use the same banner. Similarly, some networks are established to bring profit to bloggers and (understandably) to the network owner. Other networks want nothing more than to promote a near state of hippie euphoria over one particular topic.

To Join Or Not To Join

It seems to have become a habit but we can’t honestly tell you whether you should definitely join, or definitely not join, a blogging network. They work out for some by providing traffic, improving search rankings, and even helping out with the general blogging process. However, other blogs would fare better on their own, especially the more popular ones. Similarly, some networks are so powerful that they can generate thousands of hits to a blog instantly before you even submit a post, while your blog may carry a smaller network if you have good traffic levels.

The reason that a lot of bloggers do join a network is so that they can network with other bloggers. It provides a sense of belonging and can help develop blogging relationships. If you get invited or accepted into a particularly large network then you should consider trying it because it really can pay dividends but be warned that the large networks have pretty stringent guidelines that you must adhere to in order to be accepted.

What’s Next For Your Blog?

This article covers some of the blogging factors that you need to look at when you consider taking your blog to the next level. Simply posting good content will often help you build traffic, but that’s really all it will do. You need to monetize that traffic, and where possible, keep it returning over and over again. You should also employ some methods of further building your traffic, other than posting good posts.

There are many reasons social media can be a productive marketing channel or platform. Rather than employing it as a tactic du jour, the purpose should dictate strategy and the tactics used for reaching desired goals. A few common outcomes for social media marketing efforts include:

Gain insight into a community of interest -You can run all the customer surveys you want, but some of the most interesting and progressive market research can be found within the social communities where your customers interact, share information and make recommendations. Tapping into the streams of dialog is a great start to engagement and social participation with your brand.

Build brand visibility and authority – You’ve heard it before, “Conversations are happening online about your brand, with or without you.” You might as well participate and do so in a way that pays close attention to the interests and needs of your customers – providing them with information and interactions that further support your brand.

Influence and promotion of products/services – Providing information to educate customers about your products in the formats and media types they prefer can go a long way towards building the kind of buzz that results in new business. By promotion, I mean advertising on social media sites.

Link building for traffic and SEO – Creating linkbait and promoting it to social media news and bookmarking sites can attract a slew of links from bloggers that read them. However, sustaining high levels of promotion to the same site or with the same user accounts will quickly be outed as social media spam. Creating value for the community is not the only rule, creating value and behaving according to formal and unwritten rules is what sustains social media sourced link building.

Drive traffic for ad revenue models – Becoming a power user of several social communities involves consistently contributing quality content, rewarding those who vote positively on that content as well as growing a large base followers. That base of like-minded connections can serve as an effective distribution channel for unique and interesting content which drives traffic to ad supported blogs that host the content. The linkbait suggestion above not only attracts links, but also attracts traffic. However, many ad supported sites report that traffic from social media sites is notorious for not clicking on ads. It’s the bloggers that write about linkbait content first viewed on social media sites that drive the kind of traffic which results in ad clickthroughs.

The mechanisms for putting these strategies into action vary depending on the resources and time allocations a company can make on its own, or when working with an agency. In fact, it is most often due to internal resource constraints that companies outsource social media strategy and tactics in the first place.

Type in “social media marketing” into Google and you’ll get about as many search results (23 million) as there are social media tactics being promoted. As with any type of marketing, social media promotions center around matching content with interested audiences as well as stimulating conversation and buzz. Content can be created from scratch, mashed up or you can “borrow to build” by piggybacking on someone else’s social media success. The key is to listen and participate.