How To Make Your Blog Marketing Budget Work by Danny Wirken
Maintaining a blog costs money. A blog owner has to contend with hosting
service fees and other incremental expenses associated with publishing a blog.
However, there are several techniques a blogger can employ to make his tight
blog marketing budget work. Foremost of these ploys is implementing painstaking
search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. SEO helps lessen the costs of
marketing a blog.
Search Engine Optimization - Some Key Points
How do you get readers to visit your blog when you are competing with thousands
of blogs around the blogosphere and the typical web surfer seldom reads beyond
the first few results of a search query? This s the biggest challenge any
blogger has to face. Search engine optimization is the answer. Search engine
optimization is often described as the art and science of improving the
rankings of one's blog within search engine results. SEO is the best way to
drive traffic to your blog. Maximizing the benefits of a well-optimized blog
will yield earnings that will greatly help to cover the costs of blogging.
There are certain things to remember when preparing to optimize your blog. Your
blog has to be attractive not only to your visitors but to the search engine
crawlers as well. If your blog gets a good ranking in the search engine results
pages (SERP), it will mean better chances of getting visitors but it will be up
to the blog to keep them there and hopefully encourages them to buy your
product or avail of your service or whatever purpose the blog is for.
Optimizing a blog is similar to optimizing a website. But depending on the
blogging tool you use, the results may vary. A blogging software is a specific
type of content management system (software that provides a way for managing
blogs). Blogging software such as WordPress and MovableType have rich sets of
built-in optimization features that can make a blog more search engine
friendly. A blogging software provides a web standard compliant interface that
makes adding new blog posts and integrating them into the blog's navigational
structure quite easy. After making sure that your blog software is set up in
such a way that it takes full advantage of all the optimization features,
keyword rich content comes next.
A blog that provides detailed information about its area of expertise will rank
well in search engines for keywords contained in the content. Content may take
the form of articles, news stories, guides and tips, industry trends and
company developments, to name a few. To come up with the right keywords, always
consider how you want your readers to find your blog post in search engines and
what will they type if they want information on the topic you are writing.
These will provide you with hints on what words will be repeated all throughout
the article. Keywords can be used in the URL of a blog post and post title.
URLs and title tags are good places for including your keywords since search
engines are likely to give these areas more weight when indexing blog pages.
Content per post should be about one specific topic as the more focused the
theme of a blog post the better when search engines come to rank it. Adding
fresh new posts on a regular basis is highly recommended. The more you update,
the more the search engine robots will index the blog posts. Choose catchy
domain names for your blog that visitors will recall easily.
For the search engines to find you, submit your blog to them. Submit your blog
URL to be included in the index. This might take time. A quicker way is to get
linked by a blog already indexed by the search engines.
There are also certain external factors that affect a blog's search engine
ranking. The most important of these factors are the inbound links. It is a
widely accepted consensus that links pointing to your blog or posts make it for
possible for your blog to rank higher in the search engine result pages. Every
link to your blog is interpreted by the search engines as recognition bestowed
on your blog. The best method to get these much sought after links is to post
relevant content that visitors will want to read. After you publish a quality
post on a subject you know will be of interest to another blogger, you may
notify him through a short e-mail. If he does link, that will be additional
traffic and subsequently helps build your own page rank in the search engines.
Another way to generate inbound links is to submit your blog on RSS feeds to
blog directories as well as other sites that will list your blog. This is a
very effective strategy. In fact, bloggers usually submit their new blogs to
different directories. They submit links to important blog pages with relevant
keywords in the links. There are quite a number of blog directories -
http://DMOZ.org
, Yahoo Directory and the Best of the Web Blog Directory. These are the more
prominent ones. They offer free submissions.
Many blogs of the same nature exchange links with one another and form
interlink networks. The bloggers enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and
like-minded writers working together. Another way to generate quality inbound
links is to swap links with other bloggers. Someone links to you so you link
back. But in most cases links are formally arranged between bloggers. You can
also generate inbound or backlinks to your blog by leaving legitimate comments
in response to posts on other blogs. You can also get links back to your blog
using trackbacks. Trackback is a method of informing another blogger that you
wrote a post related to what he had posted on his blog.
The above techniques will help your blog perform well and at the same time
lessen the costs of marketing your blog. Search engine optimization is
important but your readers come first. So, it all comes back to quality
content. If you are publishing relevant content updated periodically, rest
assure that great sites will more likely link to your blog. As a blog
publisher, you definitely would like to be in good company.
About the Author
http://www.theinternetone.net
|
