40 simple ways to never run out of blog content ideas

40 simple ways to never run out of blog content ideas

log Content Ideas: 40 Simple Ways To Never Run Dry

by Radu| Join Jane on Google+

This post is part of the Blogging Tips 101 Contest.

Finding more blog content ideas can be very challenging sometimes.

Especially when you’re a newbie online.

It’s very stressful to have a blogging schedule in place but when the time for writing comes you desperately look for something interesting on Google.

It’s not a great position to be in at all. However, is even worse to say: “I don’t know that to write about”.

Just a big fat lie that hides a lack mindset.

Thus, I decided to create a detailed post that you can bookmark and visit often without wasting precious time and energy on surfing randomly.

You don’t have use all these sources.

Once you find few that resonate with your passions and also with the needs of your target market stick with them.

40  sources of  blog content ideas

 

1. Your target market-  this should be the most relevant source of blog content ideas.  Who are the people you serve? What are their needs, frustrations or goals?

Ask them. Find the answers and turn them into useful content.

2. Create and grow your own Facebook group- encourage the conversation and keep adding people. You will be amazed by the variety of ideas you can receive from their questions or posts.

3. Facebook News Feed- see what your friends are talking about. Be an observer. What they enjoy the most? What are their questions? Start from here.

Quick tip: set your News Feed on “Highlighted Stories First” to receive only the most popular/engaging updates.

4. Facebook Pages- your own, your friends pages  or even better, the pages of various leaders/top marketers because these are visited by thousands of people.

5. Syndication Tribes (like Tribe Pro, Triberr and  TSA Mastery) or Facebook Tribes – People syndicate here information very often A perfect place to find blog content ideas.

6. Facebook Syndication Groups- Private or open , these are created for small groups of entrepreneurs who share each other’s content.

7. Facebook Groups – often visit few good groups from your niche where people post quality content and spamming is not allowed.

8. Your passions-What excites you the most? What pumps tons of joy in your heart? Use that as an inspiration.

When you combine your passions with your business or even better you make a business from them it’s impossible not to have many things to share .

9. Your readers

Ask questions at the end of each post you write. Use their answers/needs as a starting point for new pieces of content.

10. Other blogs from your niche

If you want to be creative and productive, read. A lot.

Visit new blogs daily and connect with their owners. Double shot: relationships+ blog content ideas.

11. Blog comments

Always take the time to read the comments from your blog and other as well . Take advantage of those “gold nuggets”.

12. Your list-Ask questions in your emails. Get on the phone/skype. Listen to your prospects carefully and new suggestions will show up.

13. Keep a journal where you jot down every new idea you have or get. Come back to it often.

14.Use a voice recorder/phone to store your ideas when a journal is not available.

15. Twitter-either you use it directly or you manage it with  a tool such as Hootsuite or

40 simple ways to never run out of blog content ideas

log Content Ideas: 40 Simple Ways To Never Run Dry

by Radu| Join Jane on Google+

This post is part of the Blogging Tips 101 Contest.

Finding more blog content ideas can be very challenging sometimes.

Especially when you’re a newbie online.

It’s very stressful to have a blogging schedule in place but when the time for writing comes you desperately look for something interesting on Google.

It’s not a great position to be in at all. However, is even worse to say: “I don’t know that to write about”.

Just a big fat lie that hides a lack mindset.

Thus, I decided to create a detailed post that you can bookmark and visit often without wasting precious time and energy on surfing randomly.

You don’t have use all these sources.

Once you find few that resonate with your passions and also with the needs of your target market stick with them.

40  sources of  blog content ideas

 

1. Your target market-  this should be the most relevant source of blog content ideas.  Who are the people you serve? What are their needs, frustrations or goals?

Ask them. Find the answers and turn them into useful content.

2. Create and grow your own Facebook group- encourage the conversation and keep adding people. You will be amazed by the variety of ideas you can receive from their questions or posts.

3. Facebook News Feed- see what your friends are talking about. Be an observer. What they enjoy the most? What are their questions? Start from here.

Quick tip: set your News Feed on “Highlighted Stories First” to receive only the most popular/engaging updates.

4. Facebook Pages- your own, your friends pages  or even better, the pages of various leaders/top marketers because these are visited by thousands of people.

5. Syndication Tribes (like Tribe Pro, Triberr and  TSA Mastery) or Facebook Tribes – People syndicate here information very often A perfect place to find blog content ideas.

6. Facebook Syndication Groups- Private or open , these are created for small groups of entrepreneurs who share each other’s content.

7. Facebook Groups – often visit few good groups from your niche where people post quality content and spamming is not allowed.

8. Your passions-What excites you the most? What pumps tons of joy in your heart? Use that as an inspiration.

When you combine your passions with your business or even better you make a business from them it’s impossible not to have many things to share .

9. Your readers

Ask questions at the end of each post you write. Use their answers/needs as a starting point for new pieces of content.

10. Other blogs from your niche

If you want to be creative and productive, read. A lot.

Visit new blogs daily and connect with their owners. Double shot: relationships+ blog content ideas.

11. Blog comments

Always take the time to read the comments from your blog and other as well . Take advantage of those “gold nuggets”.

12. Your list-Ask questions in your emails. Get on the phone/skype. Listen to your prospects carefully and new suggestions will show up.

13. Keep a journal where you jot down every new idea you have or get. Come back to it often.

14.Use a voice recorder/phone to store your ideas when a journal is not available.

15. Twitter-either you use it directly or you manage it with  a tool such as Hootsuite or

WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS), and website publishing platform, powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many beneficial features including an easy to use plug-in architecture and a template system. Used by over 12% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites and 18% of all websites on the web, WordPress is the most popular CMS in use today and is the website publishing platform of choice for business and organizations of every size .

We install, build, configure and customize WordPress CMS Websites and Blogs in every imaginable configuration for all types of business and organizations. We have extensive knowledge of most major design and plug in configurations and even hold multiple developers licenses to offer you a wide variety of options for your project.

For brand new websites, & migration from free hosted services. Includes consultation to determine your needs (including choosing a Domain & Hosting), and basic training to help you on your way to administer your new website.

Software Installation and Configuration
Your choice of 100′s of layouts and styles
Theme Customization
Your choice of GPL Plug ins & Functions
(Optional) Contact & Subscription forms
On site SEO
Style and CSS Enhancements
..additional options available

You can choose to have your WordPress CMS platform installed as the platform on which you want to run your website, or use it as an addition to an already existing website as a blog addition in one of the following configurations:

Subdomain: *wordpress.yourdomain.com
Folder : yourdomain.com/*wordpress

You can title or name your subdomain or folder anything you wish. Some common designations are : “blog”, “info”, “about”, or any SEO friendly terms that enhance your company’s web presence such as location specific names.

Already have your domain and hosting and just need a professional installation of WordPress on it? We will install the latest version of WordPress along with any designs/themes, and plug ins that you have or need to get you on your way, and if needed configure them properly to get you on your way to add your content
Net Glow: Your Arkansas SEO Specialist
A Web Design and Search Marketing Agency Based in Arkansas

WordPress/Buddypress Communities:The Community Features of Buddypress can turn your WordPress website into your own public or private community with extensive group and membership functions.Great for organizations who need to offer members more communication and networking features, including running multiple websites and blogs from a single administration panel.You can have your community set up as a free or paid membership site where you set the fees.

WordPress Service and Support:I install, build, configure and customize WordPress CMS Websites and Blogs in every imaginable configuration for all types of business and organizations.I have extensive knowledge of most major design and plug in configurations and even hold multiple developers licenses to offer you a wide variety of options for your project.

Research Before you do any SEO you need to research the part of the web you will be trying to change. Many people believe this is the most important step in the SEO process. No skipping!

Check BoxComplete the The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO – Completing all the tasks on this list will give you all the skills necessary to complete this checklist. Check BoxWrite down your goal – Why are you doing this? Why do you want people to find your client’s site? Is simply viewing your client’s site not enough? My goal was “I want local parents to find my client’s website and be persuaded to register their children.” Check BoxBrainstorm and write down search queries – What words might people type into the search engines to look for your client’s company? For my example, I came up with “Issaquah Preschool,” “Issaquah Daycare,” “Sammamish Preschool,” (a neighboring suburb) “Preschool Summer Camp,” and “Creative Preschool.” Your list should be longer. Check BoxResearch your chosen keywords – Sign up for Google Adwords and learn how to use the provided “keyword tool” and “ad text ideas” generator. Learn how to use Wordtracker (paid) and/or the Keyword Difficulty tool (free). Check boxUsing what you learned from keyword research, record what you believe to be the best keywords – For my project, I used “Issaquah Preschool,” “Issaquah Early Childhood,” “Preschool Summer Camp,” and about five others. Check Box Analyze the current Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for your keywords – Who is ranking? What are they doing effectively and ineffectively? Investigate and get to know your competition. Check BoxCreate a list of your competition – Use the information from the previous step to create a list of competitors. You will use this to figure out how other sites were able to get into your targeted SERPs. Check BoxUse Yahoo Site Explorer to find the sources of your competitor’s links – Record the sources of links your competitors have and save them for later. Yahoo Site Explorer Check Box Search for your client’s site – Use the site command on Google, Bing and Yahoo to see if your client’s site is indexed. Ex. “site:www.gigglywigglypreschool.com.” If your client’s site is not indexed, you need to figure out what is preventing the search engines from crawling it. Be sure to also search the title tags of your client’s most important pages to see where/if they rank. Record your results. Onsite Check BoxSign up and verify with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing Webmaster Center – This is an important step that will become necessary later. Check Box Let Google Analytics run for two weeks before doing any SEO – This allows analytics to collect data and provides you with a baseline. I recommend you screen capture the relevant pages so you can show your client how your work has positively affected their site. Check BoxEvaluate the visual design of your client’s site – If the site drives people away, no amount of SEO efforts will help. If the site looks terrible, find well designed sites in your client’s niche. Check BoxCheck compatibility between browsers – Visit your client’s site using Mozilla Firefox 2.x and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Safari 3.x. Remember to do this on both a Mac and a PC. You want to make sure your client’s website renders correctly and won’t drive away users. Check BoxCreate a new e-mail address specific to the site you are working on – Use this address for all e-mails pertaining to your project. This is especially important for link building. Check Box Look at your HTML code and optimize all of the SEO related tags – If you are unsure what these are, reread the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization. Here are a few things to keep in mind: + Primary objective should be accomplishable from the homepage + Keyword in title tag (unique for each page, include keywords) + Keyword in H1 on each page + Keyword in text + Optimize URL architecture (www.website.com/birds/eagle instead of www.website.com/allanimals/?type=bird&species=eagle). Use 301 redirects if you rename pages + Information architecture – as few clicks as possible + On relevant images include keywords in alt tags and in filenames + Nofollow appropriate links Check BoxDecide if you need a meta description – Modern search engines are great at scanning the text of websites and displacing applicable snippets based on user queries. You need to decide if you want to rely on the algorithm or create your own description. I suggest making your own meta description for your homepage and letting the engines figure out the rest. Remember the purpose of making your description is to convince potential customers to click on your link in the SERPs. Make it convincing and use your keywords. Check BoxAdd company address and phone number – Be sure to do this on every page. The search engines are smart enough to detect address and phone number formats. This data is essential to local search. I recommend adding the the following formatted data (example is for an American company) to the footer of all of your client’s pages: Company Name 1111 11th Pl NE City, State Zip (555) 555-5555 Check Box Add a robots.txt – This is important for a couple reasons. First, it allows you to specify exactly what pages major search engines can crawl. Second, including a robots.txt makes tracking search engines easier because they always download the file before navigating your client’s site. This characteristic differentiates the SEs from normal human visitors. Offsite Check Box Add your client’s business and website to the major search engine’s local listings – This is paramount as local search is likely to drive the majority of your traffic. These are the most important places to submit: + Yahoo Local + Google Local + Bing Local + Ask City + CitySearch (data on this site feeds Ask.com and Bing) + Yelp (data on this site feeds Bing and Yahoo) Check BoxAdd your client’s website to industry specific directories – To find the relevant directories, use the list of link sources you created earlier. Also, you can try searching for “(your client’s local city name) business directory” and “(your client’s industry) directory.” For example, I would search “Issaquah business directory” and “preschool directory.” Be sure to record which directories you add your client’s site to and the usernames and passwords you use. You should use the e-mail address you created earlier for directory registrations. You should also make sure to use different passwords for different logins. You should always be thinking about maintaining your client’s security. Check BoxTry to get the links your competition already has gotten – Use the list of link sources you generated from Yahoo Site Explorer and try to acquire links from those sources. This may be as simple as submitting a form or as cumbersome as e-mailing webmasters to find out their link addition policies. Always try to get your keywords in your link anchor text. Check boxGet more links – Scour the internet and find other sites that might want to link to your client’s site (site:website.com “submit a link”). Remember the importance of the source of your links and the anchor text used. 100,000 links from spammy sites with bad anchor text will help you less than a single link with excellent keyword anchor text from a super authoritative site. A good place to start is to use the Juicy Link Finder. You should also consider your local chamber of commerce, local networking groups, and local complimentary businesses. Search engines like to see local links pointing at locally targeted websites. Check BoxDecide if utilizing social media sites is advantageous – Is your client in an industry that could actively participate in social media? If so, be sure not to be spammy and to only contribute quality and appropriate content. It is much more expensive to fix a ruined online reputation for a business than it is for a standard user. You may also want to consider adding your client’s business to professional networks such as Linkedin. Check BoxCreate and submit sitemaps – Create a sitemap. Then login into Google Webmaster Central and Bing Search Webmaster Tools and submit it. Check Box Optimize your client’s site from Google’s side – Login to Google Webmaster Tools and click on the tools menu. You will want to set the correct geographical target and preferred domain. In addition, you must also decide if you want to enable image search. It may drive you traffic but the traffic will unlikely be useful. Track and Improve Check BoxTrack progress – I recommend taking a monthly screenshot of all of the following SERPs. A screenshot is an easy way to gather a lot of information. The image files contain data on when they were taken so they are easy to organize. I recommend you do this for the following: + Ask Local SERP + Ask Main SERP + Google Local SERP + Google Main SERP + Google Webmaster Tools + Bing Maps SERP + Bing Local SERP + Bing Search Webmaster Central + Yahoo Local SERP + Yahoo Main SERP + Yahoo Site Explorer Check BoxCreate and maintain a spreadsheet of your rankings – This gives you a resource to prove to your client that your work is necessary. Be sure to keep it updated monthly so that you are always aware of how you rank. Continue to make changes, build links, and record your results – This step will never be completed. You should strive to become number one on all your SERPs and get so far ahead that none of your competitors will be able to compete.[/toggle_framed]

If you have done a search in Google you have probably seen the “Google maps”. Searches that Google determines to be local in nature will present the searcher with a local map with local business markers that show the location of those businesses in the city or region where the search has been done.

This layout was introduced as a result of Google’s determination to deliver the most relevant results possible. Since the majority of all searches within any search engine are based on local intent, Google has become the first major search engine to deliver what it knows people are seeking.

Local results!

Phone Book directories have become obsolete.

Along with the map, a list of local business listings are also displayed on local results. The markers on the map match the markers in the listings.

Frequently these marked listings appear at the top of the search result, above the regular or organic search results. These listings are Google Places pages and every business in the US can have one of these listings in Google Places.

However…

Only a small number of Google Places pages appear on the first page of a local search result!

Seven to ten listings at most. It is very important for every local business to appear as high in the Google Places search result as possible. Just like any search, those results at the top of the search page will get the majority of the visitors doing that search. If you are a local business, you need to be on the first page of a search for your products or services. You need a Google Places page and it needs to be fully optimized to rank as high as possible for those searches.

Net Glow SEO service now includes and emphasizes Google Places optimization. This service is included in the cost of the regular local SEO service which now provides a blend of organic link building SEO and Google Places page optimization. Just like organic rankings, Google Places optimization also relies heavily on fundamental SEO practices as well as Places page optimization to provide the emphasis Google needs to see to return any Places listing on the first page of a local search result.

If you are a local small business of any kind, you need a completely optimized Google Places page, including the search engine optimization of your business website to effectively leverage the potential Google and other search engines provide.

Contact Net Glow today to learn more about my local SEO service including Google Places optimization.

Net Glow Arkansas takes a look a very useful SEO WP plugin that we use for our Arkansas SEO clients-
Loading time is a critical factor for SEO, and for plain old site usability and function. At Net Glow, we have found one of the best ways to improve site loading time is by a process where you let some outside sites , in this case Google, do some of the heavy lifting, and take some of the burden off your site. In upcoming articles the Net is going to talk about CDN off loading, but right now let’s take a quick peak at the Google Libraries plugin.

By default, WordPress loads the version of jQuery that comes with the package.
But there is an alternative way of doing it and that’s to use the AJAX
Libraries API at Google Code – use their bandwidth, why not…

The advantages:-
You’ll be able to update the version your site is using quickly and easily, probably a good thing.

Google Code tends to have a policy of only including versions
demonstrated to be stable, jQuery 1.2.4 and 1.2.5 didn’t make the grade

The user may already have it cached in their browser via some
previously visited site instead of downloading from a location on your
site (and if enough sites do it, the chances are that much greater that
they will have a copy in the cache).

Not just jQuery – check out jQuery UI

Use Google Libraries: A Plugin to Improve Script Loading Performance in WordPress

For the full documentation and support forum, please see the WordPress Plugin Directory: Use Google Libraries: A Plugin to Improve Script Loading Performance in WordPress

A number of the javascript libraries distributed with WordPress are also
hosted on Google’s AJAX Libraries API.
This plugin allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution
network side of Google’s AJAX Library API, rather than serving these files from your WordPress install directly.

This provides numerous potential performance benefits:

* increases the chance that a user already has these files cached
* takes load off your server
* uses compressed versions of the libraries (where available)
* Google’s servers are set up to negotiate HTTP compression with the requesting browser

For a more detailed look see Dave Ward’s 3 reasons why you should let
Google host jQuery for
you.
Supported Libraries and Components

* Dojo
* jQuery
* jQuery UI
* MooTools
* Prototype
* script.aculo.us
* swfobject

Download

Latest version: Download Use Google Libraries: A Plugin to Improve Script Loading Performance in WordPress v1.1.2 [zip]
Support Development

If you find this plugin useful feel free to leave a tip.
Installation

Upload the use-google-libraries folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder.

Activate Use Google Libraries through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

Er… That’s it really.
FAQ

Q. What happens when Google updates their library versions?
A. Google has stated that they intend to keep every file they’ve hosted
available indefinitely, so you shouldn’t need to worry about them
disappearing.

Q. Why isn’t in doing anything?
A. Firstly, if you are using a caching plugin, flush the cache or
temporarily disable it to be sure it’s not doing anything. That said,
I’ve done my best to make Use Google Libraries gracefully step out
of the way when things are not as expected. While not, perhaps,
giving you the greatest benefit it helps ensure you site doesn’t just
flat out stop working.

In general, anything that calls wp_register_script and/or
wp_eneque_script before ‘init’ causes trouble for Use Google
Libraries. I’ve made an effort to force it to try and run anyhow,
so please report any issues with this. If you have ‘WP_DEBUG’
enabled, a message will be logged letting you know this is happening.

The Best SEO Tools from Net Glow Arkansas

Search Engine Optimization is a rather complex and never ending process. You have to analyze a lot of things including what keywords people are searching for, the density of those keywords in your sites, how many sites link back to you, how popular your links are and so on. Doing all this manually can be a huge pain.

With that in mind, regardless of whether you’re an SEO guru or a beginner, these twenty tools are guaranteed to make your life easier.

Keyword Research

When people – like us – build web sites, they assume they know what keywords people use to get to their sites. For the basic keywords this works but there a lot of untapped keywords that you might be unaware of. Doing the proper research to find out all possible keywords is imperative in this case. The keyword research tools below let you do all that in a jiffy.

Google Search Based Keyword Tool

Google’s tool provides keyword ideas and suggestions siphoned directly from Google’s search data. This is slightly different from the Adwords Keyword tool in that it suggests keywords not already associated with your Adwords account and provides a lot more information.

Just key in your site and normal keywords and let it provide you with a plethora of new ideas.

WordTracker

An excellent tool, with a paid counterpart, which lets you find out related keywords you might have missed out on so far. It also provides rough estimations of the search volume generated by the keywords.

SEOBook Keyword Suggestions

This tool cross references the keyword you input with multiple search engines to provide suggestions.

Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast

This tool predicts search volume and impressions for the keywords you enter into the system. Useful tool when you are about to launch a SEO campaign. Also provides a ton of target demographic data you’d want to take advantage of.

Trellian’s Keyword Discovery

Another popular keyword research tool with a paid version available for those who want additional features. Just type in your basic keywords and let it generate a list of top keywords which will work well for you.

Keyword Density

The number of times a keyword occurs in your page’s content is extremely important. Be too skimpy and your site won’t be counted for that keyword. Go overboard and you’ll be penalized for keyword stuffing. The optimum numbers seems to be between 2 to 4 percent and these tools will let you make sure you make this number.

SEOBook Keyword Density Analyzer

Just enter your URL and let the tool do its thing. It shows you which keywords are present most in your content, how many times it occurs and how much place it takes up relative to the other words on the page.

iWebTool Keyword Density Checker

Another tool which looks through your page and creates a tag cloud. If you prefer raw data, it also shows you how many times each keyword occurs on your page.

Webconfs Keyword Cloud

Webconfs’ tool produces a keyword cloud for easy perusal. Just like with other tools it also produces a listing of which keyword occurs the most and its density.

Search Engine Rank Checkers

Link Vendor’s Page Rank Checker

This Page Rank checker lets you find out your Page Rank at individual Google data centers.

PageRank Tool

This tools lets you find out your page rank quickly with minimal fuss.

Self SEO Rank Checker

You can find out your PageRank and Alexa rating along with a bunch of other useful info using this tool.

Link Popularity

A major part of SEO is getting linked. The number of backlinks you are getting is a fair approximation of how well your site is doing and makes tracking this statistic an important affair. Using these tools, you can find out who links to you, which pages are linked the most and a lot of other data.

WebMaster Toolkit Link Popularity Checker

Just enter the URL in question and it’ll show you how many pages popular search engines link to through their search engine result pages.

SEOCentro Link Popularity Check Tool

Lets you know how many incoming links you have and breaks it down to individual search engines. Also provides an interesting table of sites with differing numbers of incoming links for reference.

LinkVendor’s Link Popularity Tool

An excellent tool which provides a plethora of information including how many web sites link to you, how many individual linkbacks you get, your PageRank, your Alexa rank and so much more.

Site Analytics

Monitoring your site’s traffic, page views and visitor behavior is extremely important once you’ve finished the initial SEO to make sure your plan is sound. Use these tools to track down your site’s statistics.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides an extremely slick summary of your data. Use it to check which pages get linked to the most, how much time people spend on your site, what percentage of visitors are new and a lot more.

Compete

Just like Google Analytics, this tool presents an extremely pleasing way to monitor your site’s well being. As a fun feature, it lets you compare the stats of up to 5 different sites.

Mint

If you don’t mind a paid solution, Mint is a top-notch analytics suite which a lot of developers swear by. It features a beautiful interface to present all the data.

Crawl tests

Understanding how your pages look to spiders (heh) is important while optimizing for them. This lets us strip out all the visual elements and see the page as a crawler would see. Such a test helps you understand how accessible a page is to a crawler and lets you weed out potential issues before full deployment. These 3 tools let you do just that.

SEOTools Spider Test

This tool not only lets you see how your page looks to spiders but also returns a lot of useful information including the number of words in the page, the keyword density and pages you link to.

iWebTool Spider View

If you are just looking to find a tool to simulate a spider without any extra frills, this is the tool for you. Crawls through your site and lets you see how it looks to a bot.

WebConfs’ Spider Simulator

WebConfs’ Spider Simulator simulates a spider crawling through your site. Shows you how a page looks to a spider and also nets you the list of sites you link to, the meta description and meta keyword.

Conclusion

I hope this list made it easier for you optimize your web applications for search engines. With the internet being a big place, I am sure I’ve missed a ton of equally useful SEO tools. Let us know about these hidden gems in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Article reprinted courtesy of our Friends and Partners at Envato.

A word from the Author

Before we start looking at these techniques, just know and understand this: don’t expect overwhelming changes to occur over night. Getting higher ranks on search engines through SEO is a meticulous process and takes times to obtain positive results. Don’t be too hasty and more importantly, don’t resort to black hat SEO techniques. It may give you almost instant results but in the long term, the search engine is probably going to flag and blacklist you. You don’t want that. Take it slow, be earnest and wait for the results.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the number of visitors by achieving a high position within search results when relevant keywords are searched for. It is common knowledge that people rarely look passed the second or third page of the search results. Optimally you’ll want a first page position or even the first result in the first page. However, to accomplish this, you’ll need to optimize and code accordingly.

Choose the Right Keywords

Choosing the right keywords can be painless or extremely tricky depending upon the scenario. You’d want to avoid the generic ones since it is going to be extremely difficult to optimize for them. Try to pick keywords that are just as specific as they need to be. For example if you are a freelancer based in Melbourne, your optimal keywords would be freelancer Melbourne or web development services Melbourne. Going for the generic freelancer or web development keywords isn’t going to do you any good.

Research your keywords. Know which ones are probably going to be searched for most and go from there.

Focus on the Content

Content always comes first. It doesn’t matter if you perform some dark voodoo to get your site the top place in the results. You’ll still need solid content to back that up since the visitors are going to be leaving pretty quickly if they don’t find what they are looking for.

Having good, relevant content is the most important aspect of SEO. Your content needs to be suitably useful for the people who you’d want to find your site. You need the content to make sense to the reader. The content needs to appeal to people and make them come back for more.

Having original content is very important. Don’t expect to just copy-paste some text from another site, throw in some keywords and call it a day. You need lots and lots of original content with the keywords in the content itself. If people searching for jQuery come to your page, they expect something related to jQuery to be found on your page. Throw in relevant keywords within the content of the page. But don’t just spam them sporadically like with tweeting. Your keywords need to be in the appropriate position and of appropriate density. Throw too much keywords around in the content and you are going to be flagged for spam.

Just as important as having original content is having regularly updated content. Fresh content will bring in people and bots alike which in turn will let you get your site indexed with much more frequency which will in turn return fresher results to the search results. But don’t update just for the sake of updating. Bots have little incentive to come back if all the updates you perform are only marginally incremental. Just try to have something fresh for the visitors and you should be alright.

Get a Proper Domain Name

This is a hard to obtain part. If at all possible, get a domain name with the keywords in the domain name itself. www.webdevelopmentaustralia.com is going to have a lot more weight with search engines than www.somecompany.com. Obtaining a domain with the proper keywords should be difficult though.

Domains with the keyword as part of it do look ugly but keep in mind that keywords in the domain name carry very great weight.

Create Pretty URLs

Using a URL scheme where parameters are passed as a query string through the URL make it difficult for search engine spiders to look through your site. More importantly, when you are passing the session ID as part of the URL you are essentially creating a separate URLs for each session with almost the same content. This is probably going to get you penalized for duplicate content. We’ll talk about that later on.

Human readable, bot parsable URLs are generally preferred over traditional parameter filled URLs. www.somecompany.com/games/2009/callofduty6 is generally preferred to www.somecompany.com/index.php?cat=game&year=2009&name=callofduty6. When crafting pretty URLs try to avoid days, months and years. www.somecompany.com/blog/seobasics is preferred to www.somecompany.com/blog/2009/09/09/seobasics

Dish out Relevant Page Titles

The text within the title tags: the text that is displayed on your browser’s title bar is amongst the most important elements of a page. Actually I’d venture so far as to say it’s the most important part of your page after the actual content itself.

Make sure the title is unique for each page and contains relevant keywords. With regards to the title’s structure itself Page Title -> Site Name is vastly preferred to Site Name -> Page Title. There are no reasons for you to feel the title needs to be as terse as possible but on the other hand don’t try to make it too long. 60 characters is the accepted limit.

Also whilst using keywords in your title text, please don’t try to spin it too much. If the search bot sees too many keywords, you are going to be flagged for spam. Remember, the title text is what appears on the search engine result page. You need to convey as much information as possible without sounding too spammy.

Tweak the Meta Elements

The meta elements used to matter eons ago when search engine bots were less sophisticated and relied on the meta description and keyword attributes to help them. When this was taken advantage of by spammers, search bots started giving less importance to meta elements.

Having said that, it doesn’t hurt to include the meta description element. This is the text used in the description of your site. Try to limit yourselves to 200 characters, keep it simple, grammatically correct and include relevant keywords. Keep the descriptions unique for each page.

Optimize the Page Structure

Layouts vary. Positions of your sidebar or navigation vary too. But with respect to the core markup itself, it’s best to put your main content as close to the body tag as possible. If your other elements have to be placed before the content, use CSS to position it before the content instead of moving the markup itself before the content.

Footers are wonderful places to link to other content on your site. Don’t just ignore your footer. Place links to recent posts or popular posts in the footer. Having said that, try to not make it look like a link farm.

Use Appropriate Tags

Use the appropriate tags when developing a site. The heading tags are widely under used. People are instead using generic div tags to encapsulate important information. This is wrong. Strictly looking at the markup alone, the heading tags lets us see the informational hierarchy of the page and this applies for the bots too. Use h1 for the title of the post, h2 for each section’s heading and so on.

If you are including some code, use the pre tag. If you think some information is important feel free to make it bold. Bots tend to place value on bolded text just like we immediately see what the bolded text. As always, use it sparingly. You don’t want to be flagged for spam.

Craft Proper Links

When creating links, try to stay away from the generic read me text. It’s not very SEO friendly. Try to include a part of the child link’s title to the anchor text itself. This is not as hard as it sounds. For example, instead of using read more, use read more about seo. It doesn’t take that much time to change but yields a lot of SEO benefits.

While linking to page on your site, try to make the anchor text as focused as possible. Portfolio is a better candidate than What I’ve Done. The latter sounds more catchy but the former represents better SEO.

Link Internally

Courtesy of Opera

Don’t be scared to interlink the pages in your site. If the number of pages is small, putting it all up on the navigation bar is the way to go. If yours is a big site with a ton of pages, just put all the main category pages on the navigation bar. One way or the other, make sure your pages can be found through links on your site.

Thinking outside the box, you could just as easily include a popular post section on each page. This way you get the interlinking SEO needs and at the same time your visitors can get to see some of the popular posts on your site. It’s a win-win situation.

Make your site Accessible

Remember, search engines are meant to bring people to your site. Which means your site is primarily for human parsing. Design with them in mind.

Include alt attributes for all images on your site. This is not only good practice but also a necessity if you want valid markup. If it’s appropriate include relevant keywords in the alt text. Remember, search bots can’t really look at a picture and decide whether it’s relevant or not. Appropriate keywords lets it make that decision. As always don’t go overboard on the text. Keep it simple and to the point.

Please don’t hide your content behind obnoxious JavaScript or Flash. Spiders can’t go through those to get to your content. And without content, the entire point of your site fails. Miserably. Avoid this unless you absolutely have to.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Google is very strict about duplicate content and severely penalizes sites which do so. This is regardless of whether the content is on different domains. If the same, exact content appears on different pages, the page last indexed is going to be penalized.

This is mostly common sense: don’t have the same content on each page. The footer text can be repeated with no penalties but not if your footer text is big enough to qualify as an article.

Also, your site may dish out alternative print capable pages which might be seen by the search engine as duplicate content. In this case, use robotx.txt to disallow indexing on these pages.

Use robots.txt

Create a robots.txt file to allow/disallow spiders from certain parts of your site. You just create a file named robots.txt and place it at the root of your web site and all co-operating spiders will respect the rules you’ve mentioned in the file.

You can do everything from disallowing all bots from accessing a specific folder to disallowing bots from a specific search engine. Read up more about it here.

Create a Site Map

Courtesy of Opera

A site map lets the search engine know about the existence of pages it might not have discovered through spidering through your site normally. Ideally, you should create a normal HTML site map for your users and an XML site map for the search bots. If at all possible, link both.

Avoid Frames

I can’t say this enough: frames are bad. Both from a web developer perspective and a seo perspective. Content inside frames are virtually invisible to search engines.

More disturbingly, even if one frame of the page gets indexed and is returned as result the result would take you to just the frame without all of its supporting frames inside the parent document. Frames cause undue confusion to people and virtually stop spiders from crawling through your site. Unless you absolutely have to, don’t use frames.

Reduce Code Bloat

And by this I mean 2 things:

Move your JavaScript and CSS to their own separate files. Spiders have no business with them and it is best practice to remove them from the core markup. Create separate files and include them later.

No presentational markup. This is not only SEO friendly but also best practice. Your HTML markup is no place to define how the content should look and similarly the bots have no reason to know how your site is programmed to look. Format the document to your heart’s content in your CSS and leave the markup pristine and clean.

Avoid using a Flash Only Navigation

This is common sense but a lot of designers and developers tend to overlook this. Bots can’t crawl through flash based content and if the only navigation is flash based, the bot has nothing to crawl through.

If your entire site is flash based, it makes sense to create a text only version for spiders and bots to crawl through and find your content. It’ll take extra time to create that but without a text version to fall back on your site will be virtually invisible to search engines.

Use a Common Domain Naming Scheme

Decide on a common naming scheme and stick to it. Personally I prefer www.somename.com but others may like http://somename.com. Decide on a format and stick to it. Use URLs of this format while linking other pages on your site.

Also decide on a whether trailing slashes are required or not. Search engines considers www.somename.com/seo and www.somename.com/seo/ to be different URLs and there is a possibility you are going to be penalized for duplicate content. To get around this, modify your .htaccess file to redirect to the format you like with a 301 redirect. This tells the bot that the page has been moved permanently.

Submit your Site

If your site is newly hatched and hasn’t been indexed yet, it’s a good idea to get the ball rolling by submitting it to search engines and inspiration galleries. This not only let the search engines get to your site early but also brings in a ton of new traffic and back links.

Do not resort to link submitters unless you absolutely trust it. A lot of these submit your links to a number of link farms, an activity which might get you penalized. Just stick to the big search engines and galleries.

Check for Broken Links

Nothing stops spiders dead in their tracks quicker than broken links specially in the home page. Check thoroughly for broken links to ensure the bots have something to start crawling through your site.

Create a proper 404 page in case the search engine leads the visitor to an old URL. Include appropriate links in the error page.

Get Linked by Peer Sites

This is the massive step that is going to take you a lot of time to get right. Ideally, you’d want a lot of sites linking to your site and your posts . Each link to your site is considered as a vote to your site by the linking site. Getting inbound links from sites catering to the same user base is extremely vital since the current way of ranking relies on the fact that if a lot of sites link back to you then the site must contain relevant information.

Unfortunately, this is a long, arduous and never ending task and only one thing can assure you this: good content. Provide good content and sites will automatically start linking to your content. The more sites link to you, the higher your rank is going to be.

Do not resort to illegal means to get back links. This includes link farms and so. Doing anything like this is going to get you kicked out pretty quickly. Accepted means of getting back links includes reciprocal linking where a site places a link to another site in exchange for that site linking back to the original site.

The way I prefer is to write for Net Tuts. Each article I write nets me a back link and Net Tuts being as large as it is, these contribute heavily to my rankings. Plus it brings in a ton of interested new visitors.

Use Appropriate Tools

Tools like Google Analytics helps you analyze and track a number of data including from where your traffic comes from, which pages visitors look at, how much time they spend at each page, how many pages and so on. Use this data to fine tune your site.

Don’t forget Google WebMaster tools. It lets you look at the search queries which bring visitors to your page, whether the spider encountered any error while trying to crawl through your site, which sites link to you and more. Invaluable when you are trying to optimize.

Avoid Black Hat Techniques

I can’t say this enough: don’t try to cheat. Sooner or later, most probably sooner than you think, you are going to be caught and kicked out with no chance of getting listed again. This includes legit sounding techniques like link farms or cross linking to keyword stuffing and keyword dilution.

Just don’t do it.

Wait for the Results

At this point, you’ve hopefully done everything right. The only thing you need to do is sit back, generate some quality content and wait for the rankings to increase. Be patient, this doesn’t happen over night but it definitely happens once you have the basics nailed down.

Continue Learning

These are of course only the tip of the huge iceberg that is search engine optimization. Here are some links to get you started:

• WikiPedia
• Google guidelines
• Yahoo guidelines
• Bing guidelines

Article reprinted courtesy of our Friends and Partners  @ Envato

Tips and Tricks from Net Glow

One of the most important things to do when uploading your file is to make sure everything is Google-friendly. More traffic comes from Google than any other non-Envato source. Of course you know to write your description in a way that Google will like, but here are a couple other ideas you may not have already thought of.

1. Name your preview image

If you go to your item and look at the url of the fullscreen image, you’ll notice that we don’t change the image name for you. That means that if you called it preview.jpg, it’s still going to be called preview.jpg online. Google likes a good, descriptive image names. Why not name it flash-snake-game.jpg instead? Keep in mind that Google prefers flash-snake-game.jpg over flashsnakegame.jpg because there’s less confusion over the distinction between words.

2. Write your own meta description

You didn’t know that you wrote your own meta descriptions, did you? Look at the page source and you’ll see that the meta description content is just the first 200 characters of your item description. I see a lot of users starting their descriptions off with things like update logs and other info that’s irrelevant in the meta description. Also, don’t forget that Google reads the content starting at the top and works down so you should really have the most descriptive paragraph first. By the way, the meta tag ignores html so it’s okay to have an image before your text description.

The landscape of Arkansas SEO is in for some serious changes.

Google is rolling out Google+, a social media venture that offers some innovative and exciting new features that are generating some serious buzz in cyber space. This new idea is a hybrid of existing social media creativity as well as some new spins on existing problems that have arisen in other platforms, namely Facebook.

The Grow Socially staff had some feedback about the Google’s most recent foray into social media (remember Buzz, Wave). Let’s run down the features and what some of the office had to say.

Circles: Circles is a very smart feature integrated by Google in Plus. This takes care of one of the inherent Facebook problems, which is the inability to separate work and play. Now, you can create circles of friends, and post status messages to only certain circles. What you say to your weekend friends might, and probably should, be totally different from what you share with your boss or family. Project Manager Whitney Tyson says, “I think the Circles will be very good. Facebook is definitely missing the aspect of not being able to separate business from personal.  This can cause awkwardness on a variety of levels.” Whitney went on to talk more about the trouble created by this lack of separation.  “Of whether to accept or reject friend requests, you feel like you have to censor yourself on what news, photos or statuses to share and more.  Although you want to stay connected with everyone you meet, that doesn’t mean you have the same type of relationship with everyone.”

Huddle: Google wants to bring the days back of spontaneity and unplanned weekends. The official Plus blog says, “ Phone calls and text messages can work in a pinch, but they’re not quite right for getting the gang together. So Google+ includes Huddle, a group messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what’s going on, right this second.” Social Media Specialist Nolan Antonucci says, “I could definitely see the Huddle feature being a great way to figure out what we were all doing on a Friday night.”

Sparks: Similar to StumbleUpon, Sparks allow you to find interesting websites based on some search terms you enter. Google describes Sparks like this: “Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you’ll always have something to watch, read and share—with just the right circle of friends.”

Hangout: Here is where Google and Facebook are going to lock horns. Hangout is a way for up to 10 of your friends to video chat at once, at any given time. This is another way Google is trying to create the feel for close-knit communication with friends and bring back the art of the last-minute plan. Facebook just launched Video Calling, which integrates 1-on-1 video chatting right in the chat function of Facebook. Sales Executive Matt Sullivan thinks Hangout is the best feature of Google+, and enjoys the fact that video chatting isn’t limiting anymore.

The continued impact of video on social media continues to rise. Two titans of tech, Facebook and Google, have made it so simple to link with YouTube, now they both make it easy to video chat with friends. Google offers the elusive feature of video conferencing, something Skype users have been sorely missing. And Google doesn’t charge a dime.

Mobile: Google+ didn't miss a trick. And they certainly didn't forget to make their new baby mobile-friendly. They have created a feature called Instant Upload, and here is the description: "Getting photos off your phone is a huge pain, so most of us don't even bother. Of course pictures are meant to be shared, not stranded, so we created Instant Upload to help you never leave a photo behind. While you're snapping pictures, and with your permission, Google+ adds your photos to a private album in the cloud. This way they're always available across your devices—ready to share as you see fit." Can't beat that. Google is remedying problems across all sorts of channels, and they are putting all the answers in one place.

Google+ isn't fully released to the public yet, they are slowly letting more and more people on to try it out. When you do get the chance, do a little homework on it. Google's marketing campaign for this is really quite impressive. They are trying to reintroduce something that has been lost in social media: the human aspect. They want people to use Google+ to make plans, unwind, recharge, and truly make connections.

Here are a few really helpful links to get you started on your Google+ research.

A post from the official Google blog. Four really thoughtful and provocative videos.

Comparing Facebook and Google's new video chat functions.