Ping Pong For Blogs

Do you ping?  A “ping” is like ringing the doorbell of the search engines.  If you do ping,  then many pongs will come.  :-)   This may not be an issue if you’re using Movable Type, WordPress, Typepad, or Drupal 6.11.  But consider pinging to Ping-o-Matic!, if your system is not configured to do so. Ping-o-Matic pings to the most important blog search engines and directories in one spot.  If your blog application doesn’t support pinging automatically to “Ping-o-Matic!”, you can do so manually by visiting Ping-o-Matic!  Once you type your blog name and blog URL, you simply check where to ping and click “submit ping” button.  Don’t forget to bookmark the site.   It gives you the convenience of not having to crawl the site again looking for what you need.

By pinging you make search engine spiders crawl your site more frequently, and make your readers aware of your site sooner.

Oh, and one more good idea  is to visit “Technorati“  which is the definitive search engine for blogs.  You can ping your blog there also.  I always visit a few of the sites that are listed on Ping-o-Matic for good measure,  in case of technical difficulty.  And yes, I have had trouble at times playing ping pong with my blogs.

There you have it …… Table Tennis for your Blog !!!

SEO Keywords For Blogs

As far as SEO is concerned, the keyword is king. You have to find the target keyword or niche keywords.

What to do with the keyword/keywords? Please read on…..

• Enter keywords in your blog name: If you named your blog for example, “Ryen’s blog”, it’s not a good idea in the view of SEO. Instead name your blog something like “keyword blog”. You need to substitute “keyword” with your “target keyword”, for example “mountain bike blog”, if your blog is about mountain bikes.
• Enter keywords of your post in title tag: Actually most bloggers don’t need to be concerned about “title tag” because most of the blog hosting applications such as blogger, typepad, wordpress, movable type, drupal, etc… take care of this for you. But you have to use the keyword in your title and then they will include it in the title tag for you.
• Enter keywords in meta description tag, if possible: This may be difficult for most bloggers because most of the blog hosting systems don’t support this. If this is your case, don’t bother with this. Making it a possible is almost impossible for the people like me who are not techie at all. But don’t worry there is other solution: Take care with your first sentence of the first paragraph.
• Enter keywords in the first sentence: Nowadays many SEO experts say that most search engines don’t look at meta description tags. Instead they look for the few words in the first sentence. So take care of your first sentence to include the keywords, make it fit to describe your whole post and make it attractive.
• Repeat your keywords in your post: With this an English grammar teacher may not be happy. But as far as SEO is concerned, it’s necessary: frankly to say, you have to. General rule says the keyword density should be about 2-3% of all words in your post. You may complain, “how do I know keyword density.” Well, you don’t need to count it manually. There is a free tool to check the keyword density. And actually I don’t even check it all the time. I just keep in mind 2-3% and check only for some posts that I think worth checking. Having this in mind, the free tool is here. Type the URL of your post, keyword and click “analyze” button. It’ll return you the keyword density of your post. If the keyword density is too low, consider repeating the keyword more often but don’t repeat too much (more than 3%)
• Use your keyword in your blog domain: This improves the ranking of your blog and hence more traffic comes to you. If your blog is about “anniversary gift”, for example, include it in your domain name so that your blog domain looks like “anniversary-gift.yourhost.com”
• Use your keyword in the link title: Many bloggers don’t know about this! Which one do you think is better, “anniversary gift” or “anniversary-gift.your host.com” as your link title? The former is better. The reason? Because search engines value this more. So keep in mind that whenever you get links try to enter your keywords in the link title.
• Enter keywords in your file name: When you save your blog, use your keyword. Which one is better, “mypost98.html” or “anniversary-gift-how-to-choose.html”? This time the latter is better because it includes keywords and hence gets a better chance to be listed highly in the search engines.
• Enter keyword in alt tag: If you use images in your post, don’t forget to put your keyword in the “alt tag.” A two cent-tip related to this is that if your Google Adsense doesn’t seem to show matching ads with your content, check your alt tag. Maybe it’s because you put unrelated words in alt tag.

5 Steps For Blog SEO

Starting a blog is very easy. All you need to do is get a free account at Blogger or WordPress, choose a name, pick a theme and start posting. But making that blog popular and driving traffic to it is the most difficult part. Yet if done properly, it is not that complicated to create a popular blog. What you need to remember is that every blog needs good content. Do not expect to receive thousands of organic traffic to your blog if you do not have something useful to offer to your viewers. Remember, visitors need a reason(s) to come to your blog.

So what should you do to make your blog popular?

1. Add Meta Tags - use an automatic online meta tag generator to create some good meta description and tag code for your blog. Paste that code into your blog so that search engines can know what your blog is about.
2. Link Building - get a lot of backlinks for your blog. But make sure that most of these backlinks are from relevant sites. Do not go looking for links from medicine sites when your blog is about movies.
3. Social Bookmarking Sites - whenever you publish a new post on your blog, make sure to submit it to major bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc. These sites can drive a lot of traffic!
4. Forums - they are a great way to get involved into direct marketing. Communicate with other members and promote your blog on different forums (but don’t spam!).
5. Blog Comments - Commenting is still a popular way to increase popularity. It helps you in getting backlinks, building relationships with other bloggers and driving traffic.

These were some very basic tips to make your blog popular. There are other tips as well that can be more effective but beginners need to start with these first.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!