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/.

As a webmaster and SEO, one of the major focuses I have is on getting a site indexed and ranked. The focus will, undoubtedly, turn to what algorithms search engines use to rank sites and developing unique and powerful strategies to boost link popularity and PageRank.

Matt Cutts, known as the Google guy, recently answered a question at his blog about the nofollow tag:

if you sell links, you should mark them with the nofollow tag. Not doing so can affect your reputation in Google.

This statement caused quite a stir in the SEO community. Rand Fishkin comments:

Google should not have any influence on how markup is controlled. They are completely out of their jurisdiction in making this request.

“Nofollow” was created to say “I don’t have editorial control over this link or I can’t vouch for its quality.” It was not created to say “money may have partially influenced my decision to provide this link.” If that were the case, most of the link structure of the commercial web would be invalid.

Nofollow’s original design was to manage widespread blog spam where spammers would “drive-by” a blog and leave comments filled with links to their sites. This was a good practice since it was hard to manage comment spamming. The nofollow tag was never designed to isolate links as being paid. By stating that paid links should be clearly marked with nofollow, Google is acting as if it IS the web, when it clearly isn’t. The Internet is a medium where people exchange ideas, conduct research, and purchase products among other uses.

Google has no ability to track paid vs. unpaid links effectively. For every example folks are giving in the forums of how they might do it (banner ad sizes, common text link formats, etc.), there are 5 ways to have paid links they could never track down.

This is clearly the case as paid links become increasingly difficult to detect. Adopting presell pages which have been used successfully by affiliates for YEARS to promote themselves, their site, and their products, SEOs have used this same concept to create the “perfect” link. If these pages with well-chosen anchor text are placed well on highly relevant, high quality sites with decent PageRank, they boost the link popularity of the site being linked to. In essense, the site hosting these links would be offering a service to its visitors as well since the content on the hosted pages are highly relevant.

Promoting fear in your public relations to help keep your results of higher quality is a naive, short term solution. Google’s forte in quality has always been about engineering solutions algorithmically and not via public relations.

The inherent arrogance in telling web developers to modify their content to suite your whims can not have good long term results. Google is valued as highly as they are because of their brand’s goodwill. You can ask yourself whether this will help or hurt that goodwill.

Using scare tactics to provoke change will not only get Google nowhere, it’ll lead to more resentment by webmasters as they grow larger. By highlighting these weaknesses in their algorithm and promoting this nofollow nonsense, they only create a position of being powerless to combat these techniques.

They are not the only search engines around. Other search engines, Yahoo and MSN still drive a decent amount of qualified traffic even though they may not command the highest search engine market share. They’d best focus on fixing their algorithms to produce better results.

In order to be ranking competitively in Google in many, many spaces, you need to buy links. Anyone who’s done large scale link research in any niche will immediately identify dozens if not hundreds of directories, sites, membership-signups, etc. that provide high quality links (that are editorially given), but the require some type of fee. The Internet is not a commercial free, capitalists-shunned part of the world, and if you want publicity and recognition online, just as offline, you have to be prepared to spend.

The irony is that Google itself derives more the 99% of their current revenue and profit from online advertising. Without advertising, the company would have absolutely no business. The Internet is not free as directories like Yahoo Directory (which is encouraged by Google in their webmaster guidelines) and Microsoft Small Business Directory require a fee for review and submission. By stating that paid links should not be counted, Google contradicts itself further. Is it not fair for a webmaster to charge for the time required to review and if appropriate, list the site in his/her directory? What motivation would most webmasters have in maintaining a quality directory/site if there is no monetary incentive? Who’ll pay for the domain registration fees, hosting fees, and web design fees? Clearly, for the web to grow that way it has, methods of site monetization is a major driver.

At ThreadWatch, Aaron Wall adds Mozilla Developer articles use nofollow when referencing resources, Wikipedia jettisons Creative Commons, and Technorati uses nofollow on their own internal links. Some webmasters are so afraid to the point that they withold their vote for legitimate external resources when citing them, while others are even afraid to vote for their OWN sites.

Webmasters! Wake up and take back control of the Internet and stop this silliness being spread by Google. They don’t own the web. As long as you’re providing useful information and value to visitors, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with linking out to external sites. Link hoarding is simply unnatural and benefits no one except the search engines who are only too eager to have you participate in their contextual advertising programs.

Chris Beasley at Sitepoint reveals that Amazon, the world’s largest online bookstore, is interested in starting their own ad network similar to Adsense. It’s not what you think: contextual ads to serve up Amazon’s own products. They intend to “clone” Adsense. This test is only being offered to a few hand-picked sites by Amazon.

With two major players, Google and Yahoo, already in the game and MSN coming up with Adcenter, online contextual advertising could become crowded in the near future with many opportunities for web publishers to monetize their content.