web2whizzing Offered Blogging Guide With Textual And Video Tutorials.Press Release) July 16, 2008–web2whizzing, the website with blogging and social media marketing tips for small businesses has launched blogging tutorials where some are exposed in textual and other in video format. The guide is covering basics, but also bloggers can find advanced tips with particular attention on how to use blogs in business purposes. Read more

Increase Blog Traffic

July 11, 2008

„ A great site without traffic is like owning a beautiful huge store in the middle of nowhere! “

Yes, it’s MUCH about getting traffic to the web site. I am not saying it’s all about it, because you need quality content to offer as well. You see, website owner can deliver wonderful idea, amazing products, but without traffic, his business is death. So, let me say again….ITS MUCH ABOUT TRAFFIC!!! You can have fancy landing page, even forum for your website, or whatever, but without traffic, you are without a business. How to increase and get constant traffic to the blog?

If you’re just starting, you should know that blogging is a great way to increase traffic. When you are writing on a regular basis your blog will drive traffic automatically (ping and posts submission to RSS Directories). And besides that automation here are few good ways to promote your blog:

First, blog SEO

Vitally important is to optimize properly your blog for search engines. If you are new to this, I have made a weblog post how to avoid mistakes and avoid losing SEO page rank. Also I recommend putting related images to every post. You see, images are totally different type of promotion and traffic, because Google and other engines are using particular robots only for “alternative text” behind images. Discover here how properly to optimize images for your blog, and to increase traffic that way. Don’t forget to submit your blog to Google, Yahoo and MSN (although if your blog is totally new, maybe is better to wait month or two, until there is some content on the website). And above averting, if you’re using WordPress as a publishing platform or just starting with blogging watch my free WordPress SEO video tutorials (you will see which plugins are important for SEO optimization, correct permalink structure and similar matter with purpose to increase blog traffic).

Second, Article Submission

To article directories you can submit blog posts, but its better if you spin a little those articles or submit completely new. Why would you do that? Quite simple, in the submitted article, you will include a link to your web site. Submitted to many directories you are getting many backlinks and it will boost your search engine ranking. Also it will provide direct traffic from people who visits those article directories.

Here are some major directories to submit your articles to:

• Ezinearticles
• Articlefeeder
• Selfgrowth
• Knowhow-now
• Goarticles

Article marketing is a proven way to get traffic. It needs some time to provide results, but eventually, if done correctly and often, it will substantially increase traffic to the site.

Third, blog communities:

• MyBlogLog
• BlogCatalog
• Bumpzee

These sites are great way to connect with other bloggers and to use them in promotional marketing. Use tags to find your market.

Fourth, blogging traffic exchanges:

(You place widgets on your blog sidebar pointing to other blogs, and at the same time, the other bloggers are aiming to your blog).

• Entrecard
• BlogUpp!
• Spottt

These websites can drive traffic away from your blog, but at the same time will drive to it. Don’t worry, just concentrate on quality content. Find here some tips and techniques for making the content valuable. Also keep in mind that there is saying in internet marketing world regarding traffic “The more you send the more it returns to you”.

Anyway, these sites may not be an effective traffic generator for you. Test it. You won’t know unless you try it. If it doesn’t benefit you after a trial, you can always uninstall widgets.

Besides blogging exchanges, also common traffic exchanges, like Trafficswarm and Linkreferral, can increase traffic. They can be used for common website, but as well blog promotion.

This is end of the 6th step from How to create a successful blog. Happy blogging!

Related posts plugin

July 11, 2008

Welcome to the 6th video of WordPress SEO Video Tutorial. This video is guide for related post plugin for WordPress blog.

Note: to setup this plugin you will need to paste the code into the theme editor. The video is explaining that very well. I just want to warn you, whenever you’re changing something in WordPress theme editor make sure to copy whole code into the text editor on your computer before you make any change. After you have the copy of the code on your computer you can safely paste additional code from related post plugin, (what you will see in the video). This way, if something goes wrong, you can always paste back original theme code to your WordPress blog.

Create a successful blog

Google Sitemap plugin

July 11, 2008

This is the 5th video of WordPress SEO Video Tutorial.

Google xml sitemaps will automatically notify search engines after every blog post. Not only Google, the plugin will notify Yahoo! MSN and Ask engines. Download Sitemaps plugin, and watch configuration.
This video will show you how properly to optimize this plugin for your WordPress blog.

After plugin set up, I suggest you sign up for Google webmaster tool and add your Sitemap.xml to Google.

Create a successful blog

WordPress SEO plugin

July 11, 2008

Welcome to the 3rd video of WordPress SEO Video Tutorial. In this video you will see how to install “All in one SEO” plugin for your WordPress blog. This way your weblog will be much more search engine friendly.

If this is your first time installing some plugin, then it’s great you will see video guide, and I suppose its much easier then reading how-to text file. Also note, almost all WordPress plugins installation is pretty the same. After the first installation, you will be confident with any plugin setup.

Download All in one SEO plugin and watch how to install it.

You may also want to check my post on must have WordPress plugins. Enjoy blogging!

Update: this video has been created with WordPress 2.3 and since then WordPress team has released upgrade version, and you will probably use version above 2.5 for your weblog. You should know that this will NOT affect on this tutorial, only pay attention that “plugins” link in WordPress above 2.5 is at the up right corner of the WordPress admin (in the video it’s on the left side).

Create a successful blog

Install WordPress Blog Search Engines Optimized

July 11, 2008

There are a number of reasons why someone can decide to start a blog. On the first glance setup can look confusing, but truth is far from it. On the other hand you don’t want to stop just with WordPress installation, because making just few neat tweaks can bring SEO friendly weblog. Best of all, you will have video help. This is basic set of WordPress video tutorials.

Installing right plugins for WordPress helps search engine optimization for the blog. It makes the difference in front of other publishing softwares, putting you ahead of other bloggers. Step by step video tutorials will lead you through proper search engine friendly WordPress installation, but first let’s check what you need before starting the setup:

1. Web host – You need domain name and hosting for your WordPress weblog. If you haven’t already gotten your own hosting account setup, I recommend that you start off using Hostgator. They are one of the best services in the market with quality customer support (phone, forum, chat, email support). I don’t want to spoil them, but you should know:

   · for affordable price Hostgator is offering high bandwidth

   · WordPress installation with Fantastico which makes set up even more leisurely

   · there are no hidden charges

2. Ftp program - for uploading files from computer to the hosting server. You can download and use FileZilla, which is completely free. There are a lot of ftp software programs, but for most of them, you need to buy the software. Actually I only know for FileZilla as a free. Using those programs is extremely easy…just watch this short video clip which is explaining basics for FileZilla usage.

   FileZilla Instructions

   
   

3. Now you’re ready to download WordPress and to start with installation.

Video tutorials for WordPress

These videos will guide you and help you to install plugins that will give you higher search engine rankings, you will find which plugin to use for indexing optimization, which is the correct permalinks structure to use… and more tips. So lets begin:

• Famous 5 minute WordPress installation;
• WordPress blog administration guide;
• seo plugin installation;
  
• WordPress blog meta optimization;
• Google sitemap configuration;
• related posts plugin;
• tag plugin setup.

Structure A SEO Blog

July 11, 2008

Keeping blog organized is very important, making navigation smooth for you and for readers. As blog organization I think on building WordPress as silos, what in essence means thematically. Purpose of silos creating is to help Google and other search engines easier to see the site, indexing it in the right way, and eventually bringing more traffic. WordPress categories are helping so much for proper silo building. Besides that, in this article, I will guide you through plugin and pinging organization for WordPress. So, if you’re not sure how properly to build and organize your WordPress weblog, here is a clue:

Blog’s Tagline

Tagline is important, because it shows in search engine results. Besides that, it also displays in the browser’s tag when your website loads.

To set up weblog’s tagline, go to your WordPress admin / Settings / General, and enter the name and tagline for your weblog.

Make sure to include your major keyword, and even better, if you can, put it as a first word of the phrase.

Why Blog Categories Are Important?

Here we are coming to building WordPress in silo way. I have researched and watched several videos, and found this one from seomoz helpful and the easiest to understand. Watch the video and see what I mean.

In short, keep your categories organized:

• so your visitors can navigate through your WordPress weblog better and easily can find what they want
• in purpose of search engine optimization (silo organized categories help search engine to see properly your site, giving you better SEO rank and eventually send you more traffic),
• In silo-ed categories you need deep linking, to link your posts to other posts in the same silo. For example, if your silos (categories) are “SEO” and “WordPress,” then the goal is to have your SEO posts interlinking with one another and your WordPress posts interlinking with one another.

Manage Categories for your WordPress:

• Use paper and pen to design your blog;
• Go to your WordPress admin/ Manage/ Categories, and set up your categories and sub-categories. Make sure the keyword for your topic or sub-niche is included in your category name;
• Use the “description” box to enter a phrase that will show up when the visitor’s cursor hovers over the category name.

WordPress Plugins

With WordPress you can easily install add-ons called plugins which will bring more functionality to your blog. There are hundreds of them from helping you to optimize for Search Engines to translating blog in other languages, or saving it from spam comments.

Installing and Activating Plugins - Watch my WordPress weblog video tutorials. There you will find how to install and which plugins are important for search engine optimization. The installation is quite similar for all of them, and once you install the first WordPress plugin, you will be confident with configuration of others as well. Further you can browse through WordPress plugins directory.

Internal links

To connect your pages use anchor text. You can check at Wikipedia but in sum anchor text is clickable hyperlink, giving you option to put keywords, and if you are linking from the page that has good page rank, it will boost page rank of the blog post you are linking to, eventually boosting the SEO rank and getting more traffic to that blog post. At seomoz this process has been explained in details.

Additionally to that, I encourage  you to check Ian Roger’s post The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works. It will give you an idea how to interact your blog links.

Now, this is very important. I already said that you can watch WordPress Video Tutorials, where you can see configuration of “All in one SEO”, “Google Sitemap” and couple more SEO important plugins. Nevertheless, I want to list 3 more plugins which are for advanced bloggers. What I mean, if you’re new to blogging and website building you can encounter terminology which can be confusing. If it’s your situation, then I suggest you go step by step with video tutorials first, and after that follow instructions for these plugins:

• WordPress SEO Master,
• WordPress tweaks,
• WordPress Meta robots,

These plugins will give you more control in your blog structure linking. You will be able to determine nofollow for external links and you will have more control for your internal link juice.

You will notice mutual overlapping of some functions, and overlapping with “All in one SEO” and “Google Sitemap”, but it’s important to install and configure all these WordPress plugins, because every of them is bringing something unique. Where convergence is present, just disable that option for one of them (for example “WordPress SEO Master” meta description is overlapping with “All in one SEO” meta description - so  I have just disabled this option in “WordPress SEO Master” plugin). It’s not wise just to install these plugins, so read carefully instructions from plugins sites and follow instructions on plugins options page in your WordPress admin.

Update: There is a new version of WordPress SEO Master plugin, which is covering all options from All in one SEO. So, now I see it’s smarter to disable “All in one SEO”, and let “WordPress SEO Master” do whole job.

External links

Use external links to provide relevant resources. If you are using Blogroll to exchange links with other bloggers, then stay in your niche, because Google can „penalize“ you and you can lose SEO traffic if you are linking too much to topics outside of yours. This also count for blog posts, i.e. external link has to be relevant to post topic.

Ping blog

When you publish new post on your WordPress blog, it automatically announces that content to various directories by “pinging” them. Here is the list of services I ping every time with new post:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.kping.com/ping/
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc

There is no need to adjust that every time, it needs to be set only once on your blog and it will be remembered for all next posts. To set up this, in your WordPress admin, just go to Settings/ Writing and scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter the links in the rectangle.

It is important to have pingomatic (or similar services) in the list. I saw many larger lists, but I do not see point if you ping Pingomatic and after separately ping many other services (technorati, weblogs…) which are already pinged with pingomatic. Similar service is kping. I use both (pingomatic and kping) because there are some directories that are not covered on pingomatic.

There’s just one more thing. You will certainly want to install plugin Smart Update Pinger. It will adjust your blog to ping directories only when you’re publishing a new post, not when editing (what will prevent blogging directories to see your pings as spam).

This is end of the 3rd step from How to create a successful blog? Happy silos building and happy blogging!

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