Blogging Can Help Your SEO Efforts - Part 5

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 5 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Blogging and SEO - How it Can Help You

Blogging can greatly enhance any websites natural search results through regular postings, and natural keyword placement. There in fact is no stronger way to market ones website for free than by blogging with natural keywords.

Similar to article marketing, posting daily blogs with the keywords of your business included can have remarkable effects on the ranking of your site in any given search engine, and thus net you more traffic. One key to gaining more traffic from keywords is to use ‘niche’ keywords. These are keywords or keyword phrases that may be searched for less often, but that have less competition. This means you may be able to rank much higher for these keyword. An example: The keyword term “baseball” is certainly searched for often, but there are millions of websites optimized around this keyword. However a keyword phrase like “Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz news” would have fewer competitors. The longer keyword also increases the likelihood that your blog contains exactly what the visitor is looking for.

Getting picked up in search engines can lead to huge masses of traffic heading to your site every day. There are top keyword placers that use blogs to retain huge amounts of daily traffic to their sites just by integrating a variety of niche keywords into their posts. The amazing thing about blogs is they are often picked up by the search engines almost as quickly as one posts to it, which makes it a wonderful tool for SEO purposes.

Another way blogging can help your site’s search engine ranking is by the quality score. Most search engines, including Google rank sites with a quality score, the more unique, user provided content, the higher it appears the quality score becomes. If a website is just a sales page, and a few pictures, the quality score will most likely be low. But if a site has a blog on it, with fresh, daily posts, the quality score becomes much better, and thus the site gets ranked much higher when people are searching for your niche, or keyword terms.

Part 6 of this course soon: Blogging and RSS

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visit Webs 4 Small Business at http://www.Webs4SMB.com/ or Riverbank Consulting at http://www.riverbankconsulting.com/

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Software Options for Blogging - Part 4

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 4 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Blogging Software Options

When you consider starting a blog there are many options. A great way to get started blogging quickly (and for free) is to use an online ‘standalone’ service like WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com/) or Google’s Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/). These are free, highly customizable tools that support both new and more advanced bloggers. The negative is that you can’t use your website’s domain name. For instance, if using Blogger, you blog address would be something like ‘yourblog.blogger.com.’ While you can link to this from your current website, search engines won’t know give you ‘credit’ for the extra content since it is a different domain. With creative cross linking however, you can still benefit from the increased exposure you can get from a blog.

These free services provide powerful software tool that balance value, quality, and ease of use. While some people prefer to use more basic blog services, they too can truly benefit from the ‘built-in’ benefits of WordPress or Blogger along with its existing large community of users.

One of the most notable benefits of these services is the ease of use, and advanced functionality of the service compared to some blog software applications. Neither Blogger nor WordPress require you to know any ‘coding’ and allow you to built and post to your blog with easy to use icons similar to what one would see in a word processing program. Having the ability to utilize a program like this allows people to create blogs that are as high tech, and complete as full blown websites.

If you are occasionally ‘offline’ you can benefit from WordPress’s ability to import posts. This means you can put your blog together while you are not connected to the internet and then import it later. Blogger allows you to make post via email, so you also have the ability to compose offline and then quickly email once you're connectd. If you already use another blogging service such you can also import your posts directly into Blogger or WordPress.

Another benefit of these services is their large widget or element and theme libraries that allow you to instantly add useful features, and professional looking styles to your blog. A very simple drag and drop interface allows you to add features such as an RSS feed with a few clicks.

Another option to consider would be blogging software that you can directly integrate into your website. Some hosting provides such as GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com/) allow you to use your existing domain name for you blog. The benefit is that the content of your blog becomes part of what search engines see for your domain. In these cases you are more likely to pay a monthly add-on fee to your hosting provider. As an alternative, Google’s Blogger allows you to publish to a FTP site, which means you can blog from your own domain. You lose some of the flexibility of the ‘out of the box’ service, but with a little effort you can have a customized template and pretty easy posting capability that resides within your domain.

As your needs become more advanced or if you are a more technical blogger you may also consider blogging software that can be directly integrated into your website. One to consider is bBlog (http://www.bblog.com/). bBlog is an open source, PHP/MySQL application. If you don’t know what the last sentence means, then this isn’t for you. If you do know, then you may benefit from the expanded flexibility an integrated application could provide.
In the end, you have a wide, wide range of very inexpensive (or free) options to get started.

Part 5 of this course soon: Blogging and SEO - How it Can Help You

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visit Webs 4 Small Business at http://www.Webs4SMB.com/ or Riverbank Consulting at http://www.riverbankconsulting.com/

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Benefit from Niche Blogs - Part 3

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 3 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

How do you benefit from Niche Blogs?

Having a niche blog is something that can be profitable and easy, or challenging and difficult depending on how you handle the day to day posting. Niche blogs are typically blogs related to one or more specific industries or fields, including hobbies, illnesses, and sports. The more niche, or in-depth a blog is, the harder it might be for people not involved in that niche to get into it. However, people who are interested in the topic will become very loyal because they will find the connection very valuable. It is for this reason that one must think about the best way to make the most out of niche blogs, and finding the right niche is a good start.

When searching for the right niche for any blog, be sure to look at your business’s target market, topics that complement you business and your abilities to keep the blog up to date and relevant within that niche. Say you sell specialty items for baseball fans. You might consider a blog (or blogs) about your favorite baseball team(s). There is always something new to talk about in this field as long as keep up on current sports news. Sports fans that search for news on the team are already in the target market for the specialty items you sell. If you keep the information current and relevant you can become a trusted expert to those fans.

After you have selected your niche blog topic, it’s time to become an expert. No matter how much you think you know about your niche blog theme, chances are you could use some brushing up on the topic. One can brush up on a topic by simply doing research on the niche blog theme, and spending a few hours reading within the blog subject territory each day. Feel free to check out rival blogs, as they will give you an idea of what is popular in this niche, and what is not.

The most important part of getting the most out of a niche blog is becoming the go-to place for information in this niche. That means creating a blog that is constantly updated, and is accurate in the stories relating to the subject. If you do this with your niche blog, expect big time results.

Part 4 of this course soon: Blogging Software Options

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visit Webs 4 Small Business at http://www.Webs4SMB.com/

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Why Blogging is so Popular - Part 2

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 2 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

Why is Blogging so Popular?

Name one person, particularly an entrepreneur, that doesn’t like to share his or her point of view, and you will have just named nobody at all. The point is the simple fact that everyone likes to talk about themselves, and what they are up to, even if they say that they do not like doing so. There is something about being human that makes us self involved to the point where we truly feel as if others want, or need to know what is going on with us. Blogs offer a unique way to express one’s feeling or opinions on any number of issues, with the ease and exposure that only the internet can provide.

The benefit for the small business website owner is that not only do people feel connected by posting blogs, reading them has the same impact. A business owner who blogs about their experiences can create a connection with readers. That connection can easily be converted into a customer relationship.

The most common use of a blog is that of a journal, or an opinionated piece of writing involving some aspect of the author’s day to day life. While some blogs are totally commercially driven, they are often masked as personal musing in order to entice visitors. Each business owner can find the form of blog that best connects with their potential customers.

The internet can be a cold and bare place for people to be at times, and the blog helps create a sense of community with its powerful reach, and ease of use. Many people want to share, or keep up with others, but simply don’t have time. Email has gotten to the point that people are overwhelmed just to deal with their regular inbox each day, nonetheless an email from an old friend, and thus checking someone’s blog is commonplace nowadays. In fact, there are millions of blogs out there, and most of them are intended to be read by family and friends.

Blogging is popular because it relates to community, family, and friends, and therefore it is in direct relation with what matters most in life. Blogs can be a powerful tool to communicate to others, as well as to market with, as they are so friendly to search engines in terms of keywords, and ranking. Just making a few blog posts can literally get you noticed immediately, and is something that truly can help you become a big player in the internet business game. Look for

Part 3 of this course soon: How do you benefit from Niche Blog?

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visit Webs 4 Small Business at http://www.Webs4SMB.com/

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Can Blogging Help Your Small Business - Part 1

Blog for Traffic and Income

This is Part 1 of a crash course that will teach you how to use blogs to drive traffic to your Small Business Website and earn extra income.

What is a Blog and how can Blogging Help Your Small Business?

Even though blogs now seem to be everywhere, many business website owners don’t yet understand how blogs can benefit their business. This crash course will get acquaint you with the world or blogging and how you can use blogging to drive traffic to your website and ultimately drive revenue from your website.

While, the blog has been around for years, it has only come into major popularity in the last three years. The “blog” or “weblog” is simply an application that allows users to post written text that gets immediately posted to the web, like an online journal of sorts. The blog is something that is meant to be as easy to use as the word processor application on your computer. While most websites take hours to update, a blog can be updated in real time, as quick as one would save a file to a computer. This is partly what makes blogs so beneficial.

Blogging is a great way to get information on the internet inexpensively with great results, such as high search engine ranking, and free advertising. The blog, with its keyword heavy posts is a great way for a small business website owner to create traffic through search results of search engines like Google. What this means is that whether you are selling electronics, music, artwork, or wigs you can create a targeted blog and chances are that people looking for the products you are selling will come across your blog in the search engine. This added exposure will surely help more people notice your business, possibly increase your webpage rankings and most importantly drive potential customers to your website.

Blogs are most commonly found on the internet via the World Wide Web, and can be published for free by some of the biggest names on the internet. The fact that the blog is free is the main reason why people can so easily profit from using them. A blog can be started with no real upfront investment so the return on investment is almost automatic.

Look for Part 2 of this course soon: Why is Blogging so Popular?

If you need help getting started or growing your small business online, visit Webs 4 Small Business at http://www.webs4smb.com/

Can't wait to read the entire Blogging Crash Course?

Become a Small Business Insider!

Join the Webs 4 Small Business Insider Mailing List and get the full course and a valuable coupon.