Have you ever wondered why one should write guest posts or publish someone else’s article on their blog? The answer is relatively simple: Guest blogging is a win-win situation for both the guest blogger and and the blog owner because it is one of the best ways to market a resource like a website or blog through a guest post and the guest article publishing blog increases targeted traffic by providing fresh and relevant content to its readers.

Lets look at some of the advantages for guest bloggers:

Branding

By writing quality guest posts and publishing it on relevant niche blogs you can brand yourself or your organization. The more exposure your name and brand has on the web, the faster you make a comfortable footing in the industry. The idea of branding is to create a distinct picture of yourself, your products and services that differ from your competitors.

Targeted Traffic

Writing guest posts is a sure shot guarantee for increased traffic. The more guest articles you publish on related blogs, the more visibility you’ll get in your niche. You will find more people being interested in your products and services than if you just would publish the article on your own blog.

Building Relationships

One of the biggest achievements of blog writing is to build relationships with readers. Guest blogging helps you gain many contacts in your niche, thereby increasing your reach and attracting new friends, fans and followers.

Backlinks

One of the key aspects of guest blogging is that you get valuable contextual links to your website or blog. If you are in a niche market, then getting exposure through links is extremely important to get targeted traffic. Also backlinks can help increase your search engine rankings.

Reputation

The more quality posts you publish, the faster you’ll see your friends, fan and follower-base growing. Very soon you will be considered as a subject matter expert in that field and this will extend your authority in your niche.

Now let’s look at why should accept guest posts on your blog.

Content

Your blog should be rich in content relevant to your website theme and a guest blogger can help you here. A guest blogger ensures that your website doesn’t have any downtime. Just like a professional newspaper, you will be providing non-stop quality content to your readers even when you are on leave or in a case of emergency you can publish guest posts on the blog thus not reducing your traffic.

Point Of Views

A guest blogger, who again maybe a subject matter expert, will have his own ideas and points of view. You will see different perspectives and different communications being set up and thereby it will increase your blogs visibility on your niche.

Building relationships

It is always essential in your area of business that you keep maintaining relationships. When you are inviting a guest blogger to write on your blog you are actually building a long term relationship. A relationship with subject matter experts will always be helpful for you on your future endeavors.

Learn

Another wonderful aspect of guest blogging is that sometimes you may not be aware of all details about a specific topic and through guest posts you will get new insights and ideas. It can prove to be a good learning experience.

The positive features of guest blogging definitely outweigh the negative points. Why don’t start and reap in the benefits you can get from guest blogging. Now that you know the positives of guest blogging why not try it and see the impact for yourself.

Do you guest blog or accept guest posts on your blog? Did you have any success with it or do you see any potential problem? Share your experiences with me here.

admin Blog Marketing, Link Building, Web Traffic

If you are running a website or a blog, you need backlinks from other websites to get visitors. You already know that you can get links by submitting your site to directories for example, but how do you get quality links that can send you really targeted traffic?

For years, marketers have used article marketing to get targeted traffic. Article marketing usually involves writing articles and  submitting these articles to article directories like ezinearticles and other article directory sites. However, the traffic those directories send gets less and less targeted, and there is a reason for it.

But where does the traffic go?

The good news is, the traffic didn’t just disappear. Users are nowadays using other media formats like audio and video. There lots of additional content formats and media distribution options available.

I’m talking about submitting content to document sites, video sites and pod sites (a list of these sites is below).

There are so many people who are interested in the content available on these websites and are constantly searching these sites for related content. Many of these sites feature social networking profiles and functionality. You can get valuable direct traffic from these sites even though your site may be appearing on page 5 in Google with zero traffic.
However, by increasing popularity through document sites, video and podcast sites, you can also increase your google ranking in the long run.

Many people recommend social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to boost traffic. But, in reality, these sites do not publish juicy content the way document sites, video and podcast sites do.
If you depend solely on these social networking sites, your valuable content may lie buried under a bulk of personal chitchat, which mostly revolves around socialization rather than content.

If users visit your site, they should be interested in the content you have placed on your site to really become your potential customer. If you have done some selling earlier, they may even re-visit your site again to make a transaction.
Or at least they may signup for one of your mailing lists or free offers. If your content depicts about your in-depth knowledge on your subject, or it excites and enlightens rather than irritates the reader, you will attract more visitors. In order to draw those targeted visitors to your site, it is must have something to attract them.  Here is where multimedia content comes in.

After you have written your article, additionally prepare a PDF of the article and upload it to document sites like docstco and scribd.com.
Then create an audio file from your article and upload it to apple iTunes, podcast sites, etc.
Dont’t just stop there and create a video from your article, then upload it to youtube, and other video sites.
All this will definitely give you several links and push a flood of visitors to your site.

You can also explore many other publishing opportunities like free eBook directories and even publish the article on related niche blogs. Also articles can be placed on web 2.0 properties like Satellite blogs such as Squido, blogger and Livejournal.

Most of these websites permit the use of anchor text link. This can help you to increase the visibility of your website in search engines.

Document Sharing sites

scribd.com
box.net
esnips.com
divshare.com
4shared.com
gigasize.com
yudu.com
calameo.com
docstoc.com
issuu.com
edocr.com
gazhoo.com
bookgoo.com
keepandshare.com
docs.zoho.com
gotomyfiles.com
huddle.net
twidox.com
webexone.con
docuter.com
slideboom.com
slideshare.net
authorstream.com
slidelive.com
slideserve.com
myplick.com
slideburner.com
pdfcast.org/pdf
re-pdf.com

Video Sharing Sites

YouTube.com
Blip.com
uZood.com
Dailymotion.com
Metacafe.com
Veoh.com
Hulu.com
Megavideo.com
Revver.com
Vimeo.com

Podcast Sites

collectik.net
econsultant.com
divicast.com
enablr.com
feed2podcast.com
folcast.com
fruitcast.com

If you would like to see other sites here too, please send me the site URL in a comment.

admin Social Media, Video Marketing, Web Content

In order to establish yourself as trusted authority in your niche and industry, you need to learn and apply effective blog marketing techniques for your website. This article shares with you 7 useful methods for effective blog marketing.

Marketing your own blog online is not at all a tough task to do, however gaining trust from readers and presenting yourself as authority in your field is tough.

First of all, you need to be consistent. The most important part is to update your blog constantly with fresh content. If you are able to do this, you are on your way to optimize your blog marketing efforts and to establish yourself as authority.

Here are some blog marketing secrets that help you to increase authority:

1. Conduct interview sessions with other bloggers in your niche and industry. Interviewing targeted experts and thus posting all the content on your blog is a brilliant strategy get backlinks and to market your the blog online, because interviews are usually really unique and juicy content and other people like to link to unique content.
You don’t have to do it via telephone, you can also send your questions via email and they’ll send it back whenever convenient.

2. All your posts should be relevant to your website theme and maintain a certain level of quality. Don’t just cross-publish unrelated articles, this may confuse and bore your readers. Just give them what they are looking for on a constant basis.

3. Post breaking news. Make a habit of scanning the news in your market each day and write articles commenting on the news, you can add a little bit spice here and there which may create controversy. Controversy usually brings a lot of comments and search engines love busy blogs. Make sure to reply to all blog comments so that you keep up the discussion and the blog post nice and busy. This strategy will surely help you out to get more traffic.

4. Setup contests on your own blog and offer a prize related to your niche, industry and market. Contests are a great way of drawing readers to your blog and to create a community users also interact with each other. If you are selling products, services or memberships, give it as prize to your contest winner. By doing so, you will also create interest, long after the contest is over.

5. A google-recommended way to promote websites is via press-releases. Press releases are one of the first natural methods to inform the public about a new product, service and web page you have coming out.

6. Browse other blogs and give your expert opinion in the comment section of articles. Other readers will see your comment and follow through to your website. When you are trying to establish yourself as authority, it is not relevant whether the blog has a do-follow or no-follow policy. Just comment on the largest blogs in your niche. This is also a vital aspect for blog marketing.

7. While you are visiting these blogs, why don’t you send a request to the owner proposing a link exchange between your blogs at the same time? It just takes 2 extra minutes of your time and you may be getting a nice link from a related blog soon.

Do you have success/no success with any of these methods? Comment and share with me your top blog marketing strategies.

admin Blog Marketing, Web Traffic

The links pointing to a web page have a great influence on its ranking. The ranking of your pages in search results depends on a number of factors such as the quality of the the sites the text links are coming from and the placement on these sites, for example, in the footer, sidebar or within content. Additionally, relevant backlinks can send you targeted traffic directly from the link source.

The 2 Fundamentals of SEO Linking

When search engines discover and track a link, they collect a lot of information about the site where the link is found and the site the link point to.

The most important information is: anchor text and “no-follow” attribute

1. The clickable portion of the link is the “anchor text”. Search engines mostly focus on it. If possible, make sure that it contains the main keyword of your page’s content. Search engines discover and interpret the link through its anchor text. The anchor text and the content surrounding the anchor text serves as most relevant for search engines in order to correctly index your page.

2. However, you have to be aware of the fact that links with a “no follow” attribute as part of the link tag are ignored by search engines. Meaning that even though these links use your keywords in the anchor text and are surrounded with relevant content, they is not regarded as valid backlinks and do not count towards your page rankings.

Here is an example of a nofollow attribute

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/your-linked-page/”>Your Anchor Text</a>

Getting backlinks with nofollow tag are of course still helpful in sending targeted traffic, but they will not help you in terms of SEO. Most of the time blogs, social websites and many other sites use the no-Follow attribute. This is why real quality backlinks that are located directly within relevant content are hard to get.

Blog comments and forum comments are less useful for SEO purposes than links within content, such as articles and blog posts, because search engine algorithms can detect comment and signature link structures and discount these links as they are much easier to create than links in blog posts like reviews, recommendations and tutorials as they are seen as real votes for web pages.

Linknami can help you to create really quality one way links links within content in a search engine friendly way, because it instantly notifies you as soon as another Linknami posts content that fits into your text link profile and you can request the website owner to link to your website from the page where the content is posted. Other users will review and only link to your site if they are convinced that it is a valuable resource for their website visitors.

The 2 Fundamentals Of Internal Linking:

The internal links on a website can decide about the importance of the different pages within a website.

1. Your site’s navigation structure should be simple and your pages should open within a maximum of three clicks.
You should keep the most important pages with your major keywords closest to the homepage. Then work yourself down to the more detailed and least important pages which should be optimized for your long-tail keywords in a tree-like structure.
This tip is very crucial when you design and structure your website.

2. The first link on a page pointing to another page should have the proper anchor text.
To explain it in a simple way, suppose there are three links on a page X to page Y. The first link and anchor text among the three links will matter for search engines.

Focus on these tips in your on-page and off-page link building campaigns and you are well on your way to build more quality backlinks that will save you time and help your page rankings in search engines.

admin Link Building, SEO, Web Traffic

A lot of SEO experts always have a doubt whether paying for a directory inclusion is really worth the money spent? This question can not be answered in black and white; there are certain gray areas here too. The answer is nor really cut and dry, and nor can it be simply put into words to understand for one and all as this would vary from case to case.

The first thing any business organization or SEO expert must consider is whether or not all other means have been completely churned out and exhausted to get a link. It would be a good idea to consider the above before considering paying for an inclusion in any directory.

It is not rocket science to understand how to and then finally get a link; it is not that terribly difficult especially when you have access to a marketing budget and can spend money ion targeted links. Hence, it is not always necessary and wise to shell out cash to pay for directory inclusion especially when the directory is of general nature and not niche related. In a very few selective cases, where the competition is really too overwhelming and you have already covered all areas, a paid inclusion can be of advantage. A few of the directories online are well known as they have acquired a decent PR, age and and number of indexed pages. It could only prove beneficial if you are paying for an inclusion in a directory that caters to a niche and has few or no outbound links.

It would be really a great advantage and fulfilling effort if you are paying to get included in a directory with a good pagerank and alexa rank, especially under the keywords or keyword you target. This would prove to be one piece of the puzzle for you in order to move up the ladder in google rankings.

More often than not some of the directories also offers free link without reciprocation. A lot of people who believe that it is more valuable to have a one way link than to get a straight exchange; such people could easily benefit from this kind of a deal.

Hence, we can conclude that the reasoning behind whether one must spend money or not to get included in directories is not very simple to answer. It would depend from Website to Website. Your SEO expert would need to answer a few questions to analyze the directory you want to be included in. It is very necessary that this particular page is regularly indexed, has a low number of outbound links, a good PR and a decent alexa ranking. It is necessary to do follow up links and one must for sure without a doubt weigh the price and the results it could possibly give in two different sides, to know what exactly is heavier.

admin Link Building, SEO

Today’s internet marketers have realized that video marketing is one of the major traffic areas to consider for online marketing. Any website that displays video content or is a platform that supports video sharing derives a huge traffic from users online, which makes these sites major hubs for advertising along with brand promotions. A lot of marketing and SEO experts are working constantly to find different means and ways to optimize the availability of videos on these sites. The initial step is to make sure you produce quality content and along with that it would be necessary to check that the content is relevant enough to attract and access the audience you are targeting.

If you are in this situation, several SEO techniques for videos could come in handy. There are a few quick ones below that would help processing video content and optimize it for search engines.

SEO basics of video content are to embed the right keywords and include them in the title and encourage quality sharing of content. Here are additional tips for you to ensure that your videos are optimized for SEO.

1. Unique, relevant and informative videos

The most important factor of your video is quality. If the videos were substandard users will view them, leave and never come back or refer the videos to their friends, in spite of you using the best SEO techniques to optimize the same. Creating video content that is gripping and relevant, or at least slightly related to the field of business you cater to. The video must try and elaborate the service or product you offer. This would help the user to identify with the brand.

2. Make sure the length doesn’t lead to boredom

Any expert would advise you to have a video that is precise, short and also focused. A lot of users would surely get bored or tired of videos that stretch anywhere beyond 4 or 5 minutes.
Snappy and racy content would always help to engage the audience. If the video is too long and there is no way you can shorten it, try and break them into smaller parts and then tag them in order to keep away users from getting bored.

3. A sitemap for the video on your website

If the video content is being hosted on your website, make sure you have a sitemap for the site. This would help in filtering Web page ranking and help leading search engines to index the pages where the video content is displayed properly.
Making use of the exact key phrase within the anchor text that links to the video in the sitemap is mandatory as well.

4. Textual content must be supportive around the video

If you want to have a high ranking for the video content, make sure that you provide any search engine with textual content that is relevant for ranking purposes and indexing.
It is always a wise move to make sure the video is surrounded by content that is relevant to the video content and the text on that page is in sync with the video. The best way of doing this is to add a textual transcript or any relevant captions when you publish the video on the web page.

I hope that you have learned a couple of new video content SEO tips and can apply some or all methods next time when publishing videos on your website or in video platforms like youtube, vimeo, metacafe etc.

Do you have any video content optimization tips that are not listed above? Share them with me in the comments.

admin SEO, Video Marketing

Google instant search means for me that the big industry leading sites that currently already rank on top for single, 2 word phrases and so on within a niche will get even more traffic than those that currently rank for the actual keywords or keyphrases.
Those sites will get less traffic simply because users may have already clicked other search results before even completing the actual key phrase in the search field.

Here is a simple example, that can be expanded indefinitely.

I am searching for ‘blog advertising resources’

After typing ‘blog’, 7 out of the first 9 results (!) are google owned properties (and 1 result actually catering towards a google owned property. This in itself is a different topic worthy of a separate blog post. While google can obviously show what they want on their result pages, being a monopolist in their industry I don’t know if this practice is well received with regulators)

So there is no problem yet for my search, as I am searching for blog advertising resources, none of those results are of any interest to me.

After typing ‘blog advertising’, I am already getting several blog advertising resources which I am investigating and if I find what I’m looking for, I won’t need to search for ‘blog advertising resources’ anymore, which means that sites ranking for ‘blog advertising resources’ will never see me.

Here comes the SEO advice for google instant search results:

If you are ranking already high for a certain keyphrase, optimizing your page for long tail keywords that correspond to your key phrase becomes of even greater importance, in order to draw the users that are initially searching for the long tail keyword but get stuck with your page in the instant search results.

Add long tail keywords in the page description and into the content of the website, of course so that it makes sense for the surfer.

Make use of that additional targeted traffic from google instant search and ensure that you can deliver what they are looking for.

admin Google, SEO

If you take an hour or plus to write a single article, it is probably not worth it. The reward you get in return simply doesn’t justify the amount of time it takes to write it. However, the pleasant news is that you could master article writing at a rapid speed if you know exactly how you can do so.

Many of todays marketers are overwhelmed by article writing and article marketing so that they often end up hiring a content writer to do the same for them. It would be justified to do so if you are too busy to write your own articles.
Below are 5 handy tips that would make the long and tedious process of writing articles not just faster but also simpler:

1. Find decent and relevant keywords and topics.

Once you have selected your niche, do not immediately begin to pound on the key word; initially perform a keyword research to get a hang of the most soughed topics in that area. Firstly list the popular terms and then pick those that are well known. If you know your topic well, it wouldn’t be a difficult task to write an article of about 300-350 words.

2. Work on the outline of the topic.

Begin with writing all the information you think would help the reader comprehend better the main topic and then present those into a bullet list. Make sure that these are arranged in a manner that they seem valid. Once you have this outline in place it would help you gauge whether or not your content would be pulled together and whether your ideas would flow in an easy manner for the readers to understand.

3. Start your article with a great title.

A good headline is something that would surely excite and entice users online to read beyond the headline itself. The content needs to be benefit-driven, well thought over, keyword rich and last but not the least well written. It is advisable to begin with important information and to end your article with data that supports. Make sure that the article has all the content put together that the reader would be looking for; this would easily impress any reader.

4. Proofread for any spelling or grammar mistake.

Do not publish the article on any online portal unless you know that the article is 100% free of grammar, punctuation, and factual and spelling errors.
It wouldn’t be just enough if you put the articles through spelling and grammar checker software. It would be great if you could proofread these manually and then easily correct them if there is any mistake that you must have unknowingly made.
It would surely take a few extra minutes to do the same but it would assure you and provide you a guaranteed safe image about yourself on any online portal.

5. Link articles internally.

If you post the written article on your blog or on your site, it would be a good idea to consider inserting links that would lead the reader to other of your previous articles with the keyword of that article in the anchor text.

If you follow all tips above you are surely on your way to faster and more efficient article writing that not only saves you time to focus on promoting but also optimizes your pages for search engines (especially by following Tip 4.)

Discuss these article writing and article marketing tips with me. Do you have any other tips to add?

admin Article Marketing, Blog Marketing, SEO

For every online business keyword selection is a fundamental step in successful paid search (PPC) search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns. Finding the right keywords also allows you to effectively market your services and products keeping your target audience in mind.

The keyword selection strategies below can help any business, from the Fortune 100 Company to a local dry cleaner.

1. Selecting good key phrases and not keywords

The problem with ‘keyword’ is that it implies a single word and the reality is that when any SEO expert is doing a PPC or SEO campaign, no single word is used. The selection is always at least two to three words, so keywords effectively become target key phrases. A lot of times many people over think dramatically that basic keyword research must be based on what service or product one sells. For instance if I am going to sell dog food on the web; the root keyword can be neither dog nor food, as these words solely would be very poor on their own; meaning they would do a bad job at describing the product you sell.

2. Do not use major keywords as long as you do not plan to spend an 8 figure amount on online marketing

Let’s discuss a tricky example; this one clearly describes in one word as a keyword as to what product or service you are trying to cater to. If you own a jewelry store online and you are trying to sell any kind of jewelry; the keyword ‘jewelry’ would suffice and hence would become the top on the expert’s search engine goal for optimization.  No doubt that this would be a keyword that would prove profitable and also help generate relevant amount of traffic but it would be very tough to fight the competition involved. If you look at it from either PPC or SEO perspective, the ideal key phrase would be a higher conversion rate for a purchase and also be less competitive.

3. The ‘Wonder Wheel’ of Google

The Google Wonder Wheel was introduced some time ago but is not as known as Google’s other visible search tools. One could access the Wonder Wheel by doing a search and then underneath the Filter options, selecting “Wonder Wheel”.
This is in my opinion the best little secret of everyones favorite search engine: the Google Wonder Wheel. Released about a year ago but virtually unknown compared to Google is much more visible search tools, the Wonder Wheel can be accessed by doing a search and then selecting “Wonder Wheel” under the filter options on the left. When you check with the help of this tool, you would then see the visual representation of the search engine of Google and not directly the way users see the results.

4. Moderate repeating keywords within key phrases is acceptable

Repeating of key words such as ‘dog food’ is acceptable if you place them into keyphrases such as ‘dog food rankings’ or ‘dog food reviews’ or ‘dog food comparisons; the use of ‘dog food’ is just fine. One must just be sure that the keywords or key phrases are just relevant to all the content that is present other than the keywords.

5. The keywords must guide the content

To put it differently and to have phenomenal success it is better to use content that is not static for better results. The basic steps are to think about keywords and content, building a website and then finally launch a search engine optimization campaign. Try out of the box thinking. If you do so, you might get more rewards in terms of greater traffic, better rankings and also a large ROI for the efforts put into your PPC and SEO campaigns.

admin Adsense, SEO

Link building is very important in order to rank high in search engines and to get visitors to your website. However, if link building is not done the correct way, it can do more harm than good to your website. If you want to be on the safe side, follow google’s webmaster guidelines and you will enjoy long lasting page rankings in search results.  Google’s suggestions are explained here and can be helpful for webmasters and blog owners.

The following methods are fully in accordance with the google webmaster guidelines, and can be employed to get more backlinks to your blog or website:

1. Google recommends to get involved in your website’s niche community. It is suggested that you should contribute on blogs, forums, and sites relevant to your website niche. If you are able to grow your reputation in the community, you will certainly draw more visitors. Moreover, if your website becomes popular within your community, it will attract more backlinks.

2. The quality of the content on your website plays the most important role. You can contribute a lot to it. If your content is attractive, exclusive and provides useful information, more people are likely to link to it. A helpful resource is most likely to get valuable backlinks from satisfied visitors that want to spread the word.

3. Your website certainly targets a specfic audience. Your site should provide alternatives that solve your visitors’ problems. You could solve your visitors problems by providing videos, tutorials and other practical tools. Also surveys and reviews may attract many returning visitors. These methods can boost your authority in the community.

4.  Register on various niche specific directories to promote your website and get more backlinks. It is advisable to register your website manually and to avoid using bulk submission tools. Select the appropriate category and your title and description should be moderate and appropriately prepared.

5. Use of illegitimate methods to get links will not get you far if you are looking for long lasting success on search engines. Spamming is harmful for your reputation. Such shortcuts won’t get you any benefit and need to be avoided.

Your sites’ ranking is important in the google index and you should maintain proper website hygiene in order to enjoy long term results.

admin Google, Link Building, Web Content