SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Blogs have become very successful and popular of late. They can be very profitable if they are managed and marketed the right way. Generating profits from a blog doesn’t require selling of anything. You can monetize with ad placements, banners, or contextual advertising. The best blogs draw the attention of a large audience and keep them coming back for more.

There are many types of blogs. The most common types are:

• Professional blogs: These blogs are focused on discussions about professions, job aspects and career building
• Personal blogs: These blogs take the form of an online diary and contains thoughts, poems, experiences, and other personal matters
• Topical blogs: These blogs focus on a certain topic or niche, discussing specific aspects of the chosen subject
• Business blogs: As its name suggests, these are discussions about business and/or stock market
• Other types of blogs include but are not limited to science blogs, cultural blogs, educational blogs, and photo blogs.

In order to have a successful blog that attracts a lot of visitors and keep them coming back, you need to follow some simple rules.

Here are some tips:

Before you begin blogging, carefully consider what you are going to write about in your blog as there are lots of interesting topics out there, waiting to be discussed. You can find them in every day life, in the media, in the news – anything that attracts attention and a loyal following is good. You can look for blog subjects in many places, the most important being the Internet of course.

Put quality content in your blog. If you have quality content people like to read, they will return to your blog and tell other people about it as well. Posting articles containing useful information on your blog is very beneficial for attracting more traffic. Make sure you add your URL address below your posted article! If other web site owners find your articles useful and decide to include them within the content of their web pages, the added link will contribute to increasing your popularity every time it is hyperlinked.

Update the blog on a regular basis. If you don’t do this, visitors will not return and they will move on to reading another blog that is updated more often. You should try to update your blog daily. Many newcomers have blogging fear, fearing their inability to update it daily. If your blog is interesting enough, offer your readers the ability to keep it updated by posting their own personal thoughts and share stories so you won’t have to do all the updating work yourself.

Listen to what your readers have to say. Always pay attention to the readers’ suggestions and try to find out what people were actually searching for when they found your blog. Try to focus on that theme and even consider developing it by encouraging the visitors to discuss new aspects of that particular theme.

Keep it short and concise. You don’t need material that takes hours to read, people usually like to quickly skim a blog for quick tidbits of useful information and if you post materials that are difficult or take a long time to read, you will most likely drive them away.

You can also include some artistic work or pictures in the blog, to make it more visually appealing. Blog picture managers such as Picasa are freely available on the Internet to accomplish this.

If your blog has interesting, original content, bloggers might decide to add links to it on their web sites and comment on your suggested topic. By gaining back-links to your blog from other web sites, your web site will place higher within search engine queries, thus boosting your link popularity.

Announce the launch of any new blog with press releases. Free publicity through press releases are powerful tools for increasing incoming traffic. Search engines love press releases and it gives them a good reason to spider and to index your site quickly.

Include free downloadable viral reports on your blog to turbo-charge visitor traffic and build a subscriber/viewer base quickly.

In order to simplify the creating and updating process of a blog, take advantage of the many blogging tools and software readily available, a number of them are free. Blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type helps you update a blog easily. There are even free blog generators such as Blogger which allow you to host your content on Google’s servers without having to install any software or obtain a domain and host content.

Offer to inform readers of your blog with free email management services like Feedblitz (if you don’t have an email list management solution) in addition to offering RSS feeds for subscription. Readers and visitors can be kept updated of any new information being added to your blog without having to check the site constantly.

Utilize blog and ping to get sites indexed quickly by the search engines. By notifying popular ping servers monitored by blog search services such as Google Blog Search, you attract search engine spiders to a blog. A blog can automatically be setup to ping certain web sites. An easy method of doing this is by adding the Pingomatic service which pings many popular ping servers at once.

Finally, remember to submit to popular, high quality blog directories such as Feedster, Technorati, Blogstreet, and Best of the Web Blog Directory to boost your web traffic and link popularity!

If you respect these rules you will most likely have a successful blog, and you will be rewarded in the process.

This article was written by Anthony Yap of http://www.anthony-yap.com/. Anthony Yap is a SEO Expert and internet entrepreneur. He works with businesses to maximize their profit potential through cost-effective search engine optimization. All reprints of this article must include a link back to http://www.anthony-yap.com/.

I mentioned previously the offer of free web analytics through Google Analytics. Now, another major provider of another popular analytics solution is giving out free access to several of ClickTracks most popular features.

Dubbed ClickTracks Appetizer, it provides powerful features likes an overlay view, path view, page analysis and even some basic visitor labeling tools. The folks at ClickTracks will be turning on select features from their paid versions once a month with “Web Analytics Day” to give webmasters a taste of some of the more powerful features of ClickTracks.

Any search engine optimization campaign involves link building as a major element in attaining top search rankings.

To rank well long term, a SEO must seek out the highest quality links possible and avoid links from bad neighborhoods, low quality sites, and employing other questionable SEO techniques. In the search for links, how does choosing what sites to obtain links from affect rankings?

All links are not created equal. There are regular links and then there are authority links. Regular links are those from average sites that don’t rank well and have poor search engine visibility. Authority site are established, large, well-known sites. Some authority sites may also be the leading non-profit or industry association. Many of these sites will rank organically for their site name at the very least. Truly powerful authority links will rank for a variety of important keywords as well as their site name. Authority sites linking to a site build up search engine credibility and trust – factors in attaining long-term top rankings.

Here’s a quick test to determine authoritativeness of a site:

1. Well-known industry leader as provider of news/products/services (eg. Expedia, CNN, Priceline)
2. Ranks well for their site name and several important keywords
3. High Google PageRank (usually PR6 or higher)
4. Domain registered on or before 1999
5. Alexa traffic score of less than 100,000

These are just guidelines and do not necessarily exclude sites that are registered after 2000 or has an Alexa traffic score of 101,000.

What about links from .gov and .edu top-level domains (TLDs)? Are these authority as what many SEOs believe?

First realize the .gov domains are extremely difficult to come by. They cannot be bought in the link broker market – at least for now. They can only be earned. Thus, the concept of link reputation.
Let’s take a quick look at some random examples of how these links affect ranking for various keywords searched in Google. Many of these, you’ll find, have .edu backlinks.
Keyword: Football
The site funbrain.com ranks #10 and has staff.edmonds.wednet.edu, sanjuan.edu, sccollege.edu, courses.dsu.edu, www.am.dodea.edu, and teams.lacoe.edu in their top 100 backlinks.

Keyword: Diamond Jewelry
The site jewelrycentral.com ranks #7 and has emporia.edu as a backlink in their top 100.

Keyword: Sales Training
In #3 position, businessballs.com ranks with www.edu.salford.ac.uk and cyber.law.harvard.edu in their top 100 backlinks.

Keyword: Auto Parts
The site car-part.com ranks #8 and in their top 100 backlinks have wright.edu.

Keyword: Phone Cards
At #7, 1stphonecard.com ranks with a number of edu backlinks in their top 100 backlinks namely www.public.iastate.edu, lists.asu.edu, owlnet.rice.edu, www4.ncsu.edu, lehigh.edu, fcim.edu, and www.rso.cornell.edu.

Keyword: Recipes
The site recipesource.com ranks #4 with www.math.northwestern.edu, bama.ua.edu, www.cs.princeton.edu, www.accd.edu, www.oaklandcc.edu, students.washington.edu, and www.nd.edu among the top 100 backlinks.

While authority links are not required for top rankings in all industries at this moment, having authority links will give a site the unfair advantage.

I would love to do a more in depth analysis of top ranking sites in the near future. That would be a great subject for a more in-depth report.