1)      Make your browser title tags keyword driven. Do not include the company name unless it is the keywords you are targeting that page for. Also do not over use any one particular keyword once in a title tag. Also keep them to the point. Do not add more than three keyphrases within any one title tag. A good keyphrase for a credit card comparison website might be:

Compare Credit Cards | Best Credit Card Offers

2)      Getting thousands or even hundreds of links will not always help your site. Make your site a useful resource that people want to link to is much better. What you need is related sites to link to your site.

3)      Put little or no duplicate content on your website. Do not copy content from other websites and paste it onto your site. The search engines can pick up on this and do not like it. Write your own original content.

4)      Make content good quality. If you read it and think no one would be interested in this then it is no good. Do not just use content to stuff loads of keywords into. Search engines do not like this.

5)      Include meta descriptions in all your main pages. Do not make them to long though. About thirty words or so is ample. Make the description an honest and intriguing description of the page. This is what will appear in the search engine results pages and is what people will read to decide to click to your page or not. Do not keyword stuff.

6)      Do not use frames or flash in your site. Site that use either of these methods tend not to rank so well in search engines.

7)      Add useful and original content to your site on a frequent basis. Search engines like sites that have a constant flow of useful good quality original content that is related to the subject of the site.

8)      Make sure if you use image buttons for your navigation, you also include text links at the bottom of the pages to the main pages. Make the anchor text, that is the text that is the link, the text that describes the page. In other words if you have a page that is about search engine optimisation, make the link Search Engine Optimisation.

9)      Do not put invisible text or links on your site. This is not liked at all by the search engines. Also make sure all text is readable. In other words do not make it to small to read either. Text which is 9pt is probably too small.

10)  Keep up to date with the latest search engine optimisation techniques. Read sites like SearchEngineWatch.com and SearchEngineNews.com and put into Google search engine news to find many other useful websites. Another useful resource is my blog at Top Click Media Blog. The trick is to keep learning. You never know it all.

Internal linking involves the links on your website that point to other pages on your website. Internal linking is very important because it allows the search engine spiders, those automated bots that scour the Internet looking for information, to find all of the pages on your website. In comparison, external linking are links that are on your website which link out to other websites, and there are specific tactics for those as well. In this article, however, we’re going to cover a few simple tactics and strategies to get your internal linking up to speed.
When you’re developing your website, you will tend to put a whole lot of pages of similar information tailored to a specific niche or subject that you want to convey to your visitors. You probably will have information, news, how-to articles, tips and sales pages, where informed visitors can buy your products or services. Your internal linking structure will not only benefit your visitors, but it will help you rank better with the search engines as well.

Having a good navigation system makes Google and Yahoo happy, and in turn, they will reward you because you are doing things to improve the visitors’ website experience. So, for example, if you have an internal linking structure that is seamless, intuitive and allows your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for, search engines will give you more page rank, index more of your web pages and return higher search results for user queries.

Why? You have taken the time to help your website visitors have an excellent customer experience. As a result, your tactics and strategies should be geared towards giving arriving visitors not only the information that they seek, but have it presented in a way that they, and search engine bots, will love.

So how do you accomplish this? There are a few basic tactics, you can use that will improve your internal linking structure right off the bat.

Number 1 – use the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag for pages that you don’t want to pass rank to Google. For example, let’s say you had a three-page site. Now, we all know that most people have more than three pages for an entire website; however, this will make it easier to follow.

The first page is your home page which gets 100% of the search engine ranking and love. The second page is an information or information/sales page, with the third being a checkout page. If you don’t use the nofollow tag on one of the pages, both pages will be passed half of 50% each for the link from the home page. So, they’ll each get 25% of the ranking and love passed through from the spiders. The search engine spiders will naturally give your home page the best page rank and index it first. Say, you want to link to the information/sales page and make sure that a lot of people find it, because the information page is what will sell your product or service. For ranking and indexing purposes, you consider the checkout page as useless, so you don’t care if the search engines find it or not. In fact, you’d prefer it if they didn’t index it all. What do you do?
When you link from your home page, you can do one of two things.

Link to the information page only from the home page. Link to both pages but use the no follow tag to the checkout page. In that way, if someone arrives who is already sold on your product, they can go directly to your checkout page and buy the product. However, if it is an uninformed visitor, they can clickthrough to your information/sales page or they click on the indexed Google or Yahoo link that’s been picked up by the spider.

Two things happen with scenario #2. You give the customer/visitor the option. Because, the search engine is applying SEO love to one page and not two, the page rank passed will not be 25% and 25% for each page, but 0% for the checkout page and 50% for the information page which needs it. You maintain the search engine indexing and page rank for those pages that are important.

This is just one thing that needs to be considered when setting up your website. Professional SEO firms use this algorithm in order to get specific pages on your website to rank higher and return results in the search engine results pages that are much higher than other pages like your checkout pages which you don’t care about.

Number 2 – Add extra links in your navigation area or footer area that link to important pages and main sections on your website. This extremely easy tactic is often overlooked by many websites, but it does return very good results for deep linking, and most SEO firms will review your footer links when they take you on as a candidate in order to utilize that other form of deep linking.

The reason for this is that so many people forget to do it, and many Web designers add really cool buttons, images and all kinds of funky image stuff that do nothing to improve your page rank or your results in a search engines. You should remember that search engines can’t follow image links or links created in JavaScript. So, you want to add simple text links that the robots can follow to index your website more fully.

These are only two of the tactics that are covered when you hire a professional, savvy SEO firm to optimize your web layout and linking structure.

Installing the script

The next step is to download and install Wordpress according to the instructions found in many other articles. Many hosts now offer a one click operation from the control panel. There is no difference in the end result, so it may be easier and quicker for the novice to contact a hosting supplier with this option available as standard.
Once installed, we will need a theme or template to control the visitors’ side appearance of the script. These themes can be found on many template directories by searching Google. We have chosen a theme called Demar by webdemar as it has adaptable navigation and the page layout allows for the substitution of a full page header at the top. The new theme is uploaded to the server in the /wp-content/themes directory, then applied by logging in to the admin area of Wordpress and in the design, selecting the new theme.
We will not deal with the adaptation of the look of the theme in this article since it is not important when targeting search engine placement.

Adding the Tools

The next stage is the installation of the necessary plugins what assist in the site optimisation for search results. Plugins, after being downloaded and unzipped, are uploaded and activated similar to new themes except we instead upload to the directory /wp-content/plugins. Here is the list of the plugins we will apply to this site:

• All in One SEO pack
• Google Analytics for Wordpress
• Google Sitemap Generator
• Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin

All in One SEO Pack

This tool allows for a high level of manipulation of the search engine site title, site metatags and the addition of personalised page/post tiles and metatags. All an essential part of a well optimised page.

Google Analytics for Wordpress

Whilst not essential for high search engine placement, this tool is being applied in order to monitor the success of the campaign to capture key phrase results, once the site has reached its top result. The range of keywords used by visitors arriving on the site will then be clear and can then be analysed to measure the effectiveness of placement against sales.

Google Sitemap Generator

This tool is essential for Google to index dynamic websites and hence rank well. It creates not only a dynamic XML sitemap it also pings, or notifies Google when new content has been added to the site, calling the search engine spider back to index. The result therefore of daily posts can often be a daily indexing of your web sites new content. An advantage many PHP developers and SEO’s would be happy to have on their domains.

Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin

This plugin creates a feed of your sites pages and posts and allows you to add that feed easily to a network of other feeds on Social and Blog Network sites. Yahoo Explorer uses these feeds and the resulting increase in real visitors has the effect of improving search engine visitor satisfaction, holds visitors on the site longer and contributes to high search engine rank.

Filling the site with content

Now we can start to add content and structure to the blog in order to form a theme or group of themes, often call the SILO effect , the buzzword SILO is applied to the fact that although a farm may keep many different types of grain on a farm, the Silos NEVER hold more than one type of grain in each. So our new site must have 2 or 3 areas of the site which contain different themed content, but we will not mix the content between area in order to allow both search engines and visitors to clearly navigate a storage area that they are interested in. We will use the Categories area of Wordpress to control this.
To mirror the master site www.spanishgolfstaynplay.com I will next create new pages that form the navigation on the header. Each new page will be optimised using ‘All in One SEO’ on the following guidelines:

• Page title and SEO page title where possible will include a target set of keywords, be no longer than 6 words in total and be written so as to be likely to attract clicks when visitors find them on a target search engine results page. Why? Because this element of the content is what the Search Engine displays as the first line of the 10 search results on the results page.
• Keyword Description. This is a sentence or group of phrases, loaded with the target keywords yet written well enough to encourage click-through. This is normally the second row of the search engine result. This field should ideally be 160 characters long because that is the length of the field displayed on Google.
• Meta Keywords is the last editable field. Lately the industry tends not to put much emphasis on the page metatags, but this SEO is of firm opinion that different and themed keyword metatags on individual pages enhance the indexing and hence placement. You should target between 4 and 5 comma separated words in this field.

That is the basic structure of the site prepared. Now we can look at the SILO structure using categories. www.rodagolfstaynplay.com offers the opportunity to form 3 individual themes. The first is RODA GOLF, in which we can add content about the background, features and characteristics of the Golf resort. The second is the LOCATION of the Roda Golf resort. Since the aim of the site is to encourage visitors to the resorts accommodation through the site, one of the most important factors is likely to be location. Lastly the main original selling point of the site is the opportunity to stay and play golf on a pre-packaged basis. We will therefore use the last category to talk about GOLF. There are facilities to display unlimited categories on Wordpress but we do not want to spread the content too thinly, the result would be a weak SILO structure and therefore be disadvantageous for SERP’s (Search Engine Results Position).
The sidebar is the area of a Wordpress blog where dynamic menus, links and widget tools are displayed on all pages of the site. Using the Widget area of the Wordpress design we can add a text box to the sidebar. This can be filled with keyword content and headed ‘About Us’ to add a friendly hint to arriving visitors. The Categories widget can also be added below the text box and the title changed to sound less blog like. We will use ‘More About’ as an invitation to click.
Now we can start to construct posts for our site. We will apply exactly the same principle to posts as we applied to new pages, using the ‘All in One SEO’ feature to focus the titles and keyword descriptions to exactly match out target keywords.
There, that is the first part of our campaign finished. The site is complete pending additions. If you had the foresight to prepare some original content in a file before you created the blog, the whole operation up to now may have taken less time that a 9-hole round of Golf from start to finish.
See part 2 of this insight in to search marketing next week, when I talk about propagating your site articles around social network sites and link building forums in order to guarantee fast Google indexing and produce the niche SERP’s that we are aiming for.

In my years of helping online marketers promote their businesses, I have seen business models that seemed to have all of the elements necessary to ensure great success. And unfortunately, I have seen many of these perfect business models fail miserably, because their owners failed to honor their business with a realistic promotional plan.

Putting The Cart Before The Horse

When people begin to promote their new business, this is where most people begin to err.

Just recently, I spoke with an individual who started a business in a pretty competitive field. I don’t view heavy competition as being a bad thing. In fact, I find that there are often enough customers in any niche to support the additional competitors, especially when a new competitor answers a need not served by the current players.

The individual to whom I refer made his mistake by focusing 95% of his advertising budget on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), before he even knew what keywords would help him to be profitable in his business! He has so far blown $9,500 of his $10,000 to optimize his website for the search engines, and he still does not know what keywords will drive traffic to his website, leading to sales conversions for his website.

His “backwards” approach has left him with only $500 in his budget, with little hope for his future. He now emails me 4-5 times a week, always in a state of utter panic for the prospect of his future. All I can tell him is to be patient, since he has to learn how to “bootstrap” his way to success, now that he has no budget left to build strong and fast.

Test Your Copy First

Search Engine Optimization should “never” be a business’ first step in the promotion process. Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement. Look at it this way. What good is search optimization if you have optimized for the wrong keywords?

The first step in the promotion of any business should be focused on attracting potential customers to one’s website.

The marketer needs to put human eyeballs on the website, so that they can test and tweak their sales copy for greater sales conversion.

Until a website has seen several hundred visitors, the sales copy should not be changed or tweaked. Sales copy should always be tested against a large statistical group of visitors, in order to ensure that the copy is given a fair and realistic test.

If the online marketer has a bit more money to start the process, often the best spent money will be to hire a professional copywriter to write the sales copy for the website. Professional copywriters have a skill, and that skill is to create the words that will drive people to buy what you are selling.

Test Traffic Is Important To The Process

Most Internet Marketing newbies are still focused on getting those first few hundred visitors to their websites.

At this point, there are systems like Link Referral and Traffic Swarm that can help the new business owner bring in a bit of traffic to their website. In a test with Link Referral, I am seeing 250 visitors per month. The neat thing about systems like these is that other members will review your website and offer good advice on how to improve your website, if necessary. Membership is free for both systems, with an option for paid upgrades.

The Law Of Attraction

While the traffic exchange systems mentioned above can send some traffic to your website, you are not going to get rich participating in those systems.

Once you have positioned your website to convert visitors to buyers, it is time to start attracting a larger number of visitors (potential customers) to your website.

There are a number of ways to do this, but two of the most effective are: Article Marketing and Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Article Marketing

Mark Silver recently produced an exceptional home study course about writing articles that will help you be much more successful in your article marketing activities (http://thephantomwriters.com/heartofarticlemarketing).

Just last week, a friend of mine told me that he has not promoted his website in over a year, yet he noticed that his website has a steady stream of traffic to it, from the three-dozen articles that he wrote and distributed in 2006 and 2007. He said that his ebook continues to produce new sales each and every month, and the only thing he can really attribute those continuing sales to is the articles that are available on the Internet that are promoting his website and ebook.

Article marketing, in and of itself, is a promotional tool that will allow a marketer to bring regular visitors to his or her website, and if the website does its job well, then the website will be able to convert those visitors to buyers. This is important, because all businesses need money coming into a website early, to ensure that the business can survive financially, until the long-term “recipe for profit” can be found and duplicated reliably.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a process where you bid on keywords in the major search engines, through Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, etc. You tell the search engine companies what words you desire to bid on and how much you are willing to pay for a visitor, and the highest bidders for that keyword phrase will be shown above and to the right of the free results in the search engine results pages.

Keyword research, utilizing systems like Word Tracker, or my favorite, NicheBot will enable you to brainstorm keywords and get a good idea of which keywords might be more profitable for your business.

By utilizing Google Analytics or Yahoo’s Panama Full Analytics (traffic analysis), an online marketer can follow a visitor from the search engine to the marketer’s sales page. Where this is important is it enables an online marketer to uncover the essential business knowledge of which “keywords” will bring people into a website and help convert those visitors into customers.

Essential SEO Knowledge

What one must keep in mind is that some keywords will deliver visitors who will never buy, while other keywords will deliver visitors who are extremely likely to buy. This one paragraph holds within it the secret to a successful SEO strategy. This is the essential knowledge that a marketer should have, before engaging in any Search Engine Optimization campaign.

Like I said previously in this article, “Although SEO can bring great rewards, it can also be very expensive to implement.”

If you are going to spend a lot of money to optimize your website for the search engines, doesn’t it make much more sense to target the keywords that will actually help you to earn back your investment?

The Backwards Thinking

The backwards thinking I referred to in the beginning of this article was the idea that many people put SEO in front of their keyword research, keyword tracking and keyword conversion statistics.

An industry I like to pick on is the travel industry. In order to rank well for the solitary keyword “travel” in the search engines will require an astronomical SEO budget. But most people seeking travel information are looking for something just a bit more specific, like: Disney vacations, Hawaii vacations, and European travel.

So long as a keyword has been proven to convert visitors and sales, then it makes sense to optimize for that keyword. But you will never truly know which keywords will convert visitors and sales, until you have invested some of your budget into pay-per-click advertising and traffic analysis.

Once the necessary “keyword” knowledge is in hand, then the marketer can make an investment into search engine optimization for those keywords that can actually make them money, and with good SEO deployment, the marketer can find that they can actually capture a lot of the search engine traffic for specific keywords through the search engines’ free listings.

Today, with a little basic information and $50 you can have a nice niche thing going. Or with that same $50 and some hard won insider tips you can OWN any niche you want. That’s what we’ll focus on.

Just ten years ago if you wanted to profit in a niche market it was typically an expensive and risky undertaking. First you had to do the research to see if the industry was big enough to support you. Then you would setup a shop of some sort, whether it was a storefront, mall kiosk, or kitchen table, run a mail order company and tons of little classified ads to bring in the business. It usually took at least six months to see if a profit was likely in your future and finding good suppliers for specialty items could be just as demanding as selling the stuff you managed to get hold of. Thanks to the Web, those days are long gone.

Today, with a little basic information and $50 you can have a nice niche thing going. Or with that same $50 and some hard won insider tips you can OWN any niche you want. That’s what we’ll focus on.

First things first, spend wisely. Setup a budget early on and find ways to stay within it. Use free tools whenever possible and when you do need to spend money on something, make sure it’s a bargain.

Okay, now for the good stuff. Let’s start with finding our keywords…

Part One: Finding Keywords

Finding Keywords 1: We can use a free tool to do this part. Go to Google Keyword Tool and type in a common word or phrase that describes your niche (check the Use synonyms box to get the best variety of results.) Alternatively Don’t know what keywords to use in your marketing campaigns? Alternatively Download the keywords your competitors use. Find out how?

Finding Keywords 2: Now click on the “Approx Avg Search Volume” header to sort by the average monthly volume. You are going to take each of the search terms that look like good possible keywords and run a search on Google for them. But lets keep track. Take a sheet of paper (or Excel doc) and jot down the keyword, then the “Approx Avg Search Volume” and finally the number of pages returned on Google.

Finding Keywords 3: When you have that information for a good handful of keywords you want to come up with a success potential ratio for each. It’s easy. Just divide the “Approx Avg Search Volume” by the number of pages on Google. This is your success potential ratio. The higher the number; the better.

Example A: Approx Avg Search Volume (6,500) / Matching Pages on Google (100,000) = .065 is your Success Potential Ratio

Example B: Approx Avg Search Volume (9,750) / Matching Pages on Google (233,000) = .042 is your Success Potential Ratio

Example B has a lot more searches performed but with even more competition than A. Long story short, this means the keyword from Example A is likely our best bet to target.

Part Two: Securing Domain Names

Securing Domain Names 1: Now go to your favorite domain registrar (like Godaddy.com, Register.com or whatever) and run a domain registration availability search for the keyword phrase with the highest Success Potential Ratio.

Securing Domain Names 2: Use dashes! And don’t feel like the splits need to be perfect. For example, if you have a possible domain that is three words long, first try it without any dashes. That will be gone, I can almost guarantee. Next try separating each word with a dash. Maybe it’s taken, maybe not. If not, grab it! If it is taken, don’t despair. Try just one dash between the first two words and let the second and third run together. If that version is taken, move the dash so it is between the second and third while the first and second run together. Chances are you will find one that works. And the best part is the search engines read it as the same keyword!

Keep in mind, this domain and resulting Website is for SEO purposes NOT branding. Who cares how long it is or how many dashes it has? Certainly not you. The search engines will love it!

Securing Domain Names 3: A word of advice… Get your domain name as quickly as possible. The older it is, the better in Google’s eyes. And they actually run date scans on domains using a Whois registry so they know the exact date and minute the domain was registered.

If you haven’t used one, check out AllWhoIs.com or BetterWhoIs.com and enter any domain name. It tells you all kinds of stuff, including the owner, registrar, date or registration and even the owner’s home phone and address if that’s what he or she used to register.

Securing Domain Names 4: As for the domain type, .com is best bet and .net and .org extensions also do well. I don’t bother with the others and I really strive for .com whenever possible.

Part Three: Deciding on Website Type

Deciding on Website Type 1: Do you want a blog or a regular static site? For quickest results I recommend setting up a WordPress blog (free technology with thousands of free templates.) Google loves blogs because they are fresh, dynamic and already nearly perfectly optimized for their spidering bot.

Deciding on Website Type 2: If you do go with WordPress, I also recommend installing the free WordPress plugin “All in One SEO Pack” by Michael Torbert. It’s amazíng and totally free.

Part Four: Finding Web Hosting

Finding Web Hosting 1: There are tens or thousands of companies you can go with or you can even just host your site at WordPress.com.

Finding Web Hosting 2: Personally I like to maintain full control of my site for future expansions and customizations. And I have so many niche blogs in service that saving even just a few bucks is a big deal. I use the starter blog package available at Host Monster Host Unlimited Domains On 1 Hosting Account. Hosting starts from about $6.95. It’s also got push button WordPress installation, which is nice. So I’m up and running in about five minutes.

Finding Web Hosting 3: But again, there are literally tens of thousands of hosts to choose from. Shop around and stick with one you really like. It’s much easier to track each of your niche blogs with a single host (control panels, stats, etc.)

Part Five: Optimizing Your Site

Optimizing Your Site 1: So far we’ve covered how to select the most profitable keywords, purchase unbeatable domain names, use the Website type most revered by Google for quickest results and how to get reliable inexpensive hosting with bonus features. And we have only spent about $35 ($10 for the domain and $6.95 for hosting.)

Optimizing Your Site 2: Now we move onto the actual optimization part. I will laundry líst the things you need to keep in mind for a competitive edge and recommend a tool bargain if you decide you need one.

Use two of your most important keywords per page; the primary and a secondary.

Use your main and secondary keyword in the page or post title.

Try to make each page about 500 words in length or more, using at least five paragraphs.

Mention your main keyword about four times on the page as follows: Once at the beginning of the first sentence, once in the second paragraph, once in the third paragraph and once towards the end of the final paragraph.

Mention your secondary keyword about four times on the page as follows: Once towards the end of the first sentence, once in the third paragraph, once in the fourth paragraph and once towards the beginning of the final paragraph.

Add your keywords and META descriptions to the WordPress plugin “All in One SEO Pack” and let that do the heavy lifting for you.

Optimizing Your Site 3: If you have an SEO analyzer tool, use it. This is a tool that goes through you site just like Google will, and does the same to your top competitors that dominate your search engine of choice, then tells you EXACTLY what you need to do to steal their top positions.

Optimizing Your Site 4: If you don’t have a tool like that but think it would help, you can download a free tríal version of one of the better ones at iBusinessPR0M0TER.com. If you decide to buy it, you will have the same tool that makes eBay number one all over the world. And for about $250.

Well that’s it. You can dominate any niche you want with little time, effort or expense. Why do I feel so confident about it? This is the exact process I have used to dominate over fifty niches from Bass fishing to coin collecting and, of course, search engine optimization.

Above all else enjoy the ride. Best of luck!

A: Better SEO, total control, more traffic and more sales – although those reasons won’t apply if you’re not blogging for business!

When I started out blogging I opened a blogger.com account. That worked fine for me at the time because I was new to blogging. In fact, I knew so little about it at the time that I didn’t even realise that I could host my own.

Even if I had realised that, it’s not something I would have given a moment’s thought to. I was too new to working online. I was (still am) totally non-techie and it would have been too daunting a task.

So I happily blogged away on my blogger account until I logged on one day to find that Google had translated all the admin pages into Chinese. I live in Hong Kong so Google, thinking they were being smart, used my IP address as the basis on which to make the decision to translate it.

Not being able to find the help link (because I can’t read Chinese) I logged into my Google account (Adwords, Gmail, etc,) to raise a request for them to translate my blog back to English.

After a week nothing had happened. I’d got no reply and still couldn’t read my admin screens. So I simply decided to transfer my blog to Wordpress.com.

By this time I had learned enough about blogging to have heard that Wordpress was the place to be. So I imported all my old Blogger posts and started to learn Wordpress. Given what I’d heard I was looking forward to great things.

One thing I noticed immediately was that my posts were suddenly figuring much more quickly in the natural search results, so it looked as though at least some of what I’d heard was correct.

And I happily blogged away until…

…one day I tried to log on to be met with a notice telling me my blog had been suspended for infringing Wordpress’ terms and conditions.

DAMN..!! Twice inside a month I’d been blind-sided by my blogging platform and the second occasion was even more damaging than the first. (It doesn’t look too professional when your visitors are told that your blog’s been suspended for infringing terms and conditions).

So, finally, I was pushed into the realisation that I had no option but to set up my own blog and host it myself.

So off I clicked to Wordpress.org to see what I could find out. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Firstly – the instructions they’ve set out for downloading and installing a WP blog are delightfully clear and easy to follow.

There are a few minimum requirements set out, which pretty much every hosting provider meets. You can always check with your provider if you’re not sure. Mine does, so I printed off the instructions and got going.

First step is to set up the database. Easy to do – the instructions are very clear, include screen shots for every step of the way and are written in simple, non-techie language.

I then downloaded and unzipped the blog files, entered my newly created database details into the config file, (just followed the instructions), uploaded the files and accessed the installation screen via my browser (the URL is provided in the instructions). That kicked off the installation script and I was all done.

It was, literally, a 5-minute exercise.

However, the majority of hosting providers now give you an even easier method than that:

One click installation.

I’ve never done a 1-click installation so I can’t confirm whether it really is one click or whether a few more are involved – but it’s definitely very easy and it doesn’t involve any downloading, unzipping and uploading of files.

So what are the benefits of running your own blog on your own server?

You have total control. You can write what you like, you can drive traffic to affiliate programs, no one is going to translate it into Chinese, and no one is going to lose your database.

You can customise it as much as you like. Customisation is done through plug-ins, and there are plug-ins for just about anything you can think of. You decide what you want to do with your blog, then you can either go to the Wordpress plug-in directory or do a Google search for a plug-in for the function you want.

Download the plug-in, unzip it, upload it and activate it through the blog admin screens. It’s that simple. Really.

But of all the sexy things you can do with your self-hosted blog, probably the biggest benefit of all comes from the SEO elements.

This really turns your blog into an incredibly effective way of figuring strongly in the natural search results.

Optimising your blog for the search engines is simply a question of installing and activating the appropriate SEO related plug-ins. And you can find probably the best list of these in Jack Humphrey’s Authority Blackbook.

If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up your own, self-hosted blog then you should absolutely download this book and follow the guidelines in there for optimising it properly for the search engines.

Firstly, it’s free and secondly, if you don’t set up your blog properly you’re wasting an enormous portion of its SEO potential.

It would be like buying a Ferrari but never taking it out of the city centre.

I’m now using my blog as my primary means of drawing in traffic. I haven’t spend a dime on promoting it – and I don’t have any intention of doing so going forwards.

And yet my blog is now attracting a little over 50% of the total traffic I’m getting on a weekly basis – that’s traffic to my blog plus traffic to all my other sites – and that’s almost totally due to the SEO effectiveness of my plugin-rich, self-hosted blog.

Within the next year I’m aiming for that to be well over 80%.

About this author

Martin Malden grew up in Zimbabwe and now lives in Hong Kong. He writes a blog covering tips, techniques and resources for small- or home-business owners. For more information check out his blog here:
http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submittíng to other search engines but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Also submít your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

4. Offer a sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but the same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keyword stuffing.

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

9. Your Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

10. Your Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters, including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. The keywords Meta Tag must be 15-20 words maximum.

12. Optimize pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site’s primary keywords.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engine spiders have difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as a link farm by search engines.

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site.

17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since your site was last crawled. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use a Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders that index your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. With bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about the Robots.txt file.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engine ranking.

22. Avoid links to bad neighborhoods such as web spammer, link farm, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, pörn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affect your search engine rankings.

23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings or perform other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as a spammer.

25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show the search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.

26. Do not attempt to create pages that contain phishing, scam, virus, trojan, backdoor, spyware, adware or other malicious programs.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links is far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and ranking. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.

30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some use illegal and questionable methods to improve rankings.

31. Do not buy or sell links.

32. Do not create sites that contain purely affiliate links and no valuable content that is useful to users.

I hope these tips will add more popularity and visibility to your site. Enjoy!

While it is true that you can put together an ad on Google or Yahoo!, pick a few keywords that describe your business, then bid on them and be up and running with a Pay Per Click campaign in a few minutes, the actual process requires considerably more thought. Here are a few key points to consider:

What is the goal of your ad? If you are an e-commerce merchant selling mainline products, you probably want to generate a sale. If you are operating a decorating business, your goal more likely is to generate a lead for follow-up. That goal will shape how you structure your campaign.

What kind of landing page do you want the user to click through to? Is it a specific product page with all the information necessary to complete the order or do you want your customer to land on your home page in order to get more information about your company? You may want your ad to be product specific or have a more general message.

Is there a special “deal” that you can offer in your ad? Phrases like “free shipping”, “save 10% now” or “sale ends tomorrow” create a sense of immediacy that can increase the likelihood someone will click on your ad.

You don’t have to have the top ad listing in order to be successful. While being #1 likely will bring you more clicks, you don’t want to overpay for them. Typically, as long as your ad appears in the first five positions, and has a compelling offer, you will get your share of clicks.

The keywords you select for your ad are critical. In fact, the difference between a cost-effective campaign and one that just costs you money often are the keywords you select.

Try to avoid buying general terms, unless your site has a very, very broad selection of product. The keyword “cars” might bring anyone who is looking for anything having to do with a car – that probably doesn’t do you much good if you are selling radiator hoses.

Stick to words and phrases that relate as specifically as possible to what you are selling. A good rule of thumb is that the more general a keyword is, the more expensive it is.

The page customers land on when they click on your ad should contain similar words to those used in the ad. Reinforcing the ad message is important for two reasons: first, it tells people they are “at the right place” and second it will help your Quality Score on Google and Quality Index on Yahoo!.

Google in particular attaches great importance to the relevance of your landing page and you may be able to secure a higher ad position with a lower bid than other advertisers.

Monitor your campaign regularly. This is particularly important at the outset when you are establishing what works and what doesn’t. Pay per click advertising isn’t day trading – you don’t have to be glued to the monitor but you don’t want hours to go by without seeing if your clicks are converting into your desired result of sales or leads.

A large search agency might suggest that you need 1,000 or more clicks to determine if your campaign is working. As a start-up or small business, you (or your agency) should be able to draw conclusion with far less clicks than that.

The bottom line here is that a site built entirely in Flash still faces huge obstacles. While there have been recent moves from Google and Yahoo! to try to index the content from combined Flash/SEO sites, those moves have not yet, from my experience, translated into SEO results or success (at least when compared to html sites).

We should make a distinction here between embedded Flash and sites built entirely from Flash. For example, a site that contains Flash elements but still contains basic html elements will not overly suffer, as the Flash element (usually a movie in a box on the homepage or elsewhere) is externalized. A search engine spider will generally not try to parse through any files that have been externalized in the code – they will only index the code that is readily apparent on the source page.

However, from an SEO results perspective, there are still major issues with sites that are built entirely in Flash, and SEO is normally the first thing that suffers. First of all, the URL generally never changes no matter where people navigate on the site. As any decent SEO practitioner will tell you, every page of your site is a potential entry page for a search engine. With a site built in Flash, SEO suffers even more as you only have one potential entry page, which is the main URL. This cuts off dozens, hundreds, or thousands of potential pages that could otherwise be indexed in Google and Yahoo! (and all other engines). When your only potential entry page in the search engine listings is your home page, it is very difficult to target a wide assortment of keyphrases, potentially eliminating SEO results or rankings.

Content is another very large issue. Search engines rank pages based upon a number of criteria, but one of the most important to SEO results is the text that they can “understand” on individual pages. At present, search engines read primarily html text (although some also read text in the PDF format) – which means that if you decide that you want to use a rare and fancy font that must be displayed in graphic form (since the visitor may not have that particular font available on his or her computer while browsing), the engine will not read the text and therefore will not know what the page is about, which could harm SEO results. Naturally, this also includes any of the text included in Flash. While Yahoo! and Google have recently announced enhanced capabilities in reading content within Flash, I have not personally seen that translate into great SEO results for competitive keyphrases.

One other emerging aspect is that as search evolves, more and more people are looking for information while they are away from their computers. Many mobile devices are currently incapable of displaying Flash content, although recent moves by Adobe to make “Flash Lite” available may change this. However, it remains to be seen whether people that are seeking information on a mobile device will even want to navigate through Flash, especially if they can get the information that they seek from a fast-loading html page. In my opinion, lean html content will be at a premium when a company is trying to target a mobile audience.

Despite the difficulties, it is not the intent of this article to assert that Flash and SEO will always be incompatible – merely that it is the state of the current situation. You can find many differing opinions on mixing Flash and SEO on the internet, but the true test is to try to find a Flash site (that is to say, a site built entirely in Flash) that you admire and see if it ranks well in SEO results for 50+ competitive terms that are related to the specific business (in Google or Yahoo!). In my experience, such sites that combine Flash and SEO are nearly impossible to find. If anyone out there knows of one, please let me know.

Flash can be, and often is, used for great effect on the internet, in interactive kiosks, and in many other applications. I’m not from the “any Flash is bad” school, although I do think that many Flash practitioners tend to get a little carried away and often ignore basic usability issues. However, sites built entirely in Flash with SEO elements are still, again in my opinion, like oil and water – Flash and SEO are obviously individually useful, but they don’t mix well. Until they do, I will continue to advise my clients not to build sites entirely out of Flash – or, at the very least, to have an alternate html option for search engine and user preference purposes. At the end of the day, many clients are surprised to find out how many visitors actually prefer “old school” html.

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