Dear Google Apps Admin,

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*Global Insight, 2009.

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Sincerely,
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*Global Insight, 2009.

Blogging is better than SEO for getting traffic. Are blogging traffic or SEO traffic generation techniques better for you, or does it not really matter? Its always a controversy. Lets find the answer for this.

Actually, a lot depends on you and which you like best: blogs or traditional websites, and also what you want the traffic for. I also wonder why the distinction is being made, since anybody serious about internet marketing and getting plenty of traffic, will use both. However, when I hear such arguments I get the feeling that it is more academic than which provides the more traffic. Feelings however can be wrong, so it is worth discussion.

When you think about it, the type of traffic you get from a blog could very well have different needs and interests to those that reached your site after carrying a search on Google or Yahoo using specific keywords. OK, you can get to blogs from search engines also, and through the use of keywords, but if you are looking to buy something you wouldn’t normally log onto a blog, would you?

Let’s say you wanted the best price for a gross of Titlist golf balls, you wouldn’t visit a blog site. Similarly if wanted to discuss their benefits, you would go to a blog or a forum. Sometimes it gets difficult to tell the difference these days, since blogs are becoming increasingly more interactive, but you get my general drift. I hope!

With a blog you can advertise whatever you want to, and the same is true of a website. However, you are more likely to make a direct purchase from a website, and to seek information from a blog. Hence, the traffic you get on a blog is information seekers and those on your website may also be looking for info, but might also be wanting to make a purchase. So right away we can kind of separate blog readers from website visitors.

It’s not a well defined separation, but bloggers tend not to be looking for something different to what a search engine user is looking for. If you have a blog on your website, your blog page will be likely to attract prospects that will tend to be more regular visitors than those that are checking out your website. If the latter don’t respond to your opt-in form, you will be unlikely to see them again, but a visitor to your blog page might return frequently.

However, to return to the question: what is better, blog traffic or SEO traffic, as long as each is free it doesn’t really matter I would have thought. I suppose that it could be argued that the SEO traffic is more focused because they have used your specific keywords to get to the page they landed on, and blog traffic could come from ezines and other sources that are perhaps not specific to any product you are selling. Me, I would accept any traffic no matter where it came from, and quite frankly once the traffic gets to your webpage it is up to you to convert it to sales.

The difference between the two is that if you don’t make an immediate impact with the SEO visitors, you could be struggling to keep them returning to your website, but you are likely to have more time with the bloggers, since they tend to keep coming back to the blog. The SEO visitors might register with your opt-in page, but that only allows you to keep in contact with them, and you still have to try to induce them to return to your website. For more information logon to www.offline-promotion.com .On the other hand, the blog readers need no such inducement, since they visit your site each time you publish a new posting. That is assuming that your blog is on your own website, and not on the blog server as many (perhaps most) are.

Perhaps I am completely on the wrong track, but I will keep tabs on it and report on my website what my findings are regarding blog traffic and SEO traffic, and whether or not one tends to buy more that the other. It is useful to know, since for a website that is designed to sell products it can determine whether or not it is worth having a blog on your site or keep trying to improve your SEO.

That is a big decision to make, and if it could make the difference between success and failure then it should be determines mathematically and scientifically rather than by conjecture and opinion. It is scientific testing that frequently makes the difference between those that are successful in internet marketing and those that fail.

Source

When you first start your blog and your intention is to make money online, you’ll realize that something is blocking you to increase your earning. In order to increase your earning, you need to drive more traffic to your blog on regular basis. There is nothing more you can do to make money online if there is no traffic to your blog.I was asked by many blogger fellow about how to drive significant traffic to their blog, I believe that this is a popular question for all the blogger and webmaster as well. When I first started my blog, I tried many methods to drive traffic to my blog, of course not all methods worked. There are many ways that you can do to drive traffic to your blog, here are 10 ways that I tried myself and found it quite effectiveness, so I would like to share with you guys.

10 Effectiveness Way To Drive Significant Traffic

1) Blog Commenting
No doubt, this is the best way to drive traffic to your blog. Search for similar niche blog, read the articles and leave comment. No spammy comment like “Great Post”, you will just get pissed off by the blog owner. Most of the blog owner loves person who leaves comment on their blog, they will visit the commentator’s blog to see who is reading their blog. If they like the content your blog, they will return and read again. With that said, you’ve driven some traffic to your blog.

2) Forum Posting
Forum posting will be another way to drive traffic to your blog, perhaps you’ll not be getting much traffic from forum since there are thousands or millions of forumer trying to promote themselves, the competition is strong. Recently I’m quite active in WarriorForum and DigitalPoint, I’ve received some referral traffic from there too. In order to drive traffic from forum posting, you need to be active and helpful in the forum, try to answer as much questions as you can. The last thing is, don’t forget to place a link on your signature.

Here is a list of 130 dofollow forums, I hope you find it useful.

3) Get Featured On Newspapper
This might be a difficult way to drive traffic I believe, but try to get featured on your local newspaper when you get a chance. This blog was featured on New Straight Times (Malaysia’s oldest and largest newspaper publisher) and I’ve got some traffic from there too. You must try to stand out from crowd in your country to get featured, as I’m Top #1 for the keyword “Make Money Online” in Google Malaysia. You must not need to rank #1 for the keyword “make money online” in your country, you can be active and stand out from the crowd in your field too.

4) Do Link Post
Link post is a post that link out to many articles that you find useful and interesting from fellow bloggers. They like their articles to be featured in somewhere else, it goes same to you, aren’t you? When you link to the article, you’ll probably get a trackback from the article, they will like to visit the blog that features their article. In return, they will like to link your article on their link post as well. This is what we call relationship or network, give before you get. I’ve written a link post “66 Professional Blogger You Should Follow” in the past and had good experience with that.

5) Stick To Relevant Content
Content is the factor that keeps your reader to return and read your blog again and again. Writing relevant content as what your blog title says is very important. A reader read your blog because of your blog title says something that attracts them to visit your blog, if you write something which is not relevant to your blog title, says your blog blog title is “How To Make Money Online“, but you write something about health, car, or technology, it doesn’t make sense, so your reader may quit your blog and not to come back anymore. Sometimes you can write about your personal rambling, but not too often.

6) Running A Blog Contest

Blog contest is another popular way to drive significant traffic to your blog, everyone likes free stuff and want to win something from the blog contest. There are various blog contest on the blogopshere, some requires you to subscribe newsletter, write a blog post, retweet the post, social bookmarking the post, you name it, the more points you’ve collected, the higher chance to win the contest.

There is another type of blog contest that the participants need to leave the most comments to win the contest. With that said, they will need to keep visiting the blog to see any new post, so that they can leave a comment or two. This kind of blog contest might bring you tons of traffic, but you need to take some times to approve and reject genuine or spammy comments. The main point is that you need to give out attractive prizes to attract more participants, you can either give out prizes yourself or look for sponsorship.

7 ) Guest Posting In Relevant Blog
I’ve been doing guest posting for quite some times and I love the result. I’ve been submitting some guest posts to the Top Make Money Online blog, MoneyMakerInfo.Blogspot.com. As you know this blog is at the Top 3 for the keyword “make money online” and many other relevant keywords, so the blog is generating thousands unique visitors everyday, so writing a guest post to the high traffic blog might bring you some traffic too. There are many high traffic blog out there, search for blog which has similar topic with your blog, write and submit an interesting guest post to them. You can get some traffic, as well as strong one way backlink.

8)  Add Your Blog Link In Email Signature
You might have sent out some interesting forward emails to your friends and family. From there, add your blog URL in your email signature, whenever you send out an email, you have a blog link in your email signature, you will be getting some traffic from there. You send an email to 100 friends and 10 of them visit your blog, how about if you send 10 emails a day? I believe that you might have more than 100 friends in your mailing list, so you might be able to more traffic from there.

9) Add Your Blog Link In Social Networking Profile

Facebook is the largest social networking on the web now, I believe that you know what is Facebook and you would have an account and having some friends also right? Add your blog URL in your Facebook profile, when someone read your profile and they might be interested to visit your blog too. You can also post the link of your latest article on your wall. The function is similar to Twitter, so be sure you have signed up both of them.

10) Conclusion

Here are the top 10 ways that I found it quite useful and effectiveness to drive significant traffic to our blog, now the step you need to follow is action. Many people knows the way to drive traffic, but they don’t want to action due to laziness, that’s the biggest block and you need to avoid this.

Have you done any method that listed above? Or what method did you use to drive traffic to your blog?

Source

Well, after a brief few months my first Squidoo pages have achieved PR values of 5 and 4. My Jean Grey Squidoo Lens is a PR5. So as a high PR link building service Squidoo works quite well.
As an search engine optimization consultant I sometimes have a hard time deciding what is the best use of my time. Research, link building, writing or what have you. Well, this week I did more research than usual and found a site that I had heard about, but had yet to fully explore: Squidoo. What is Squidoo? Well, to put it simply, it is a collection of web pages that users can build on any topic, and I mean any topic that you can imagine. And if you can’t find it, you can create a new page on Squidoo yourself.

Squidoo says you can do it in under 5 minutes, but you’ll want to take longer to build a respectable page, or “lens” as they call it.Squidoo LogoOnce you do you can add modules that let you make money from affiliate sales to online stores such as Amazon and Overstock. I don’t know how much of a money making opportunity it is and I would dare say you can’t make a lot of money with Squidoo, but it did give me some ideas on how to use it for SEO purposes. As a business owner and website owner, you can use Squidoo for two important tasks to help your website: link building and visitor traffic.Testing SquidooI decided to test this out and I built two lenses for fun. I like smoothies, so I tried my hand at creating a smoothie drink lens to support my personal smoothie recipe blog. It was simple to build and I followed the advice for getting the word out and then spent the next 4 days investing a few spare moments here and there, adding new content and pulling information from my smoothie recipe blog and now I have a fairly large lens, compared to most. As of today (8/12/2007) there were over 213,000 lenses on Squidoo. My smoothie lens was ranked #132 and at times has been as high as 128 with less than 8 hours of work total over one week. The second lens is for a favorite comic book character, Jean Grey (Phoenix) from the X-men and has done for pure entertainment and even that has achieved a rank as high as #376. The lenses were fun to build and I enjoyed both immensely.

Getting Traffic from Squidoo

Okay, big deal on my “success” within Squidoo, it hasn’t earned a single cent yet and might not ever. I have many links on my smoothie lens pointing to my smoothie blog and the good news is that these links have driven more traffic to my smoothie blog in the last week than all other incoming site traffic combined. The reason it has been successful is the fact that the Squidoo lens I created is already showing up in the search results, after less than a week, for terms related to smoothie recipes. (See results.) So it is driving traffic to my smoothie blog and could be doing the same for your business. If you sell toys you may want to create a Squidoo lens one of your products like yo-yos. The idea is to create a lens about something specific so your lens can rank for it and then link to your site. Which brings me to my other reason for creating a lens. My SEO heart practically skips a beat.

Link Building with Squidoo

As any SEO company can tell you, link building is the most time-consuming and hardest part of our jobs. Everything come down to link building. That is what increases your rankings, helps people find you and so forth. If you have an SEO company working for you now and they aren’t putting forth a majority of their time finding and placing links for you, it is time to move on. With Squidoo you get an awesome link building resource where you control the anchor text in the link, where the link points to, where it lives on the page and what is written around it. It also comes from a high PR site. It is almost the exact definition of my idea of the perfect link. If you look at my smoothie lens you can see dozens of links pointing to my smoothie blog. And not links just to the homepage, but deep linking to internal pages which are important links very difficult to get usually. Well, with Squidoo you can make many deep links which will help your site’s search engine visibility and increase rankings to those deep pages. One-way, keyword-rich, high-quality links are all made easy with Squidoo. If you spend a little time with your lens you may soon see it increase to a PR 4 or PR 5 webpage on its own and we know how hard PR 4 and 5 links can be to get on our own.

Google & Squidoo

Of course, with all good things there come people who look to ruin it by misuse. Well, the same can be said of Squidoo. Many spammers have tried and are trying to create a glut of spammy pages on Squidoo for the purposes of SEO. Google saw this and minimized the importance of Squidoo but in return Squidoo has made spamming harder and set the bar higher for a Squidoo lens in hopes of getting more quality lenses. It looks as though Squidoo may have weathered the fury of Google and for the time I would recommend highly creating a quality Squidoo lens to help your own site. Heck, create more than one if you need it, but be good stewards if you do and create lenses that have weight of their own and are not a pure marketing ploy. Those lenses will be the most effective in the long run and help Squidoo remain a useful tool in your marketing tool belt.

Final Thoughts on Squidoo

Give it a try, it will only take an hour or so, despite the 5 minute promise from Squidoo, and then see what you think. We will be including it as part of our work for our clients, as we do with all new strategies that can help. Of course, Google could decide they don’t appreciate the work being done by Squidoo members, Squidoo could decide to make all links not SEO-friendly (nofollow or redirects) or any number of SEO killing decisions, but until then I personally think it is a good use of a few hours.

YouTube Video about Squidoo Marketing

You can find many videos on how to use Squidoo and here is one of the better ones I watched. If the video isn’t playing, you can go right to youtube.com and watch the video:watch?v=HiR5BIX-_RQ

Twitter can give you real time web data where we are hearing about google’s rumor about real time search capabilities for last few months. Now we can depend on twitter for real time web data and use it as a real time search engine, now is a great time to take a closer look at your Twitter presence.

Now, all the rumors signifying that Google will soon offer real-time search capabilities, indexing Tweets and other real-time web data, now is a great time to take a closer look at your Twitter presence.

As an example:

Google is already indexing tweets so Twitter pages and even individual tweets have already in progress appearing within Google search results.

SEO tips on Twitter:
Creating a Username:

Before starting a twitter is sure to pick an user name that’s relevant to your brand or campaign and easy to remember. The selected username, becomes apart of your customized Twitter URL such as twitter.com/yoursite or twitter.com/yourtopic.

Doing this creates a static address for future search indexing, which also helps usability for other cross-channel promotions.

Select an account name wisely (Make Your Account Name Different from Your Username):

Optimize the Twitter account name to best reflect your brand or campaign. Which can be different than your handle/URL? You obviously want an account name that promotes yourself, your company or your brand. You should also consider which variation of you brand name has the most search frequency every month.

Make your bio count

Optimize your Twitter page’s “Bio” line because this includes the most important, mission-critical phrases for your brand. Use target keyword in description to take advantage of all 160 characters. Your bio is indexed so its contents are what provide your Twitter page with its core relevance.

Spread the word

Link reputation of this newfound social web address. You can incorporate your Twitter URL into your website by placing a call to action on the site for your customers to follow you on Twitter. You could also incorporate your Twitter URL within your site’s Global Footer, which appears at the bottom of every page of your site. Both of these options offer usability to your site visitors and help drive your Twitter URL up in the search engines.

Remember your URL

In Twitter account settings, add your website’s URL or perhaps use it to promote your presence on another social platform, for example, yoursite.com. This is a great way to drive traffic. Link does not provide any offsite reputation due to a “Nofollow” attribute that Twitter has in place.

Select the initial characters of each tweet carefully

Each tweet appears to be significant for SEO as it will conclude what appears in the tweet’s title tag when it shows up as a search result on Google. Tweet title contain Approximately 42 characters. Keep in mind that your full tweet and all its characters are still being indexed by major engines, though.

Keyword Rich Tweets:

Everywhere, start your tweet with a primary keyword phrase to theme each message. Take advantage of any “active lingo” or words as this will enable you to capitalize on timely searches on those terms.

User-Friendly Retweets:

Write your tweets in such a way that they are very simple to other people to resend. In order to allow other users to retweet your message, do not use the maximum number of characters. You should strive to tweet high quality content using keywords and in such a way which makes it easy for others to retweet.

Use TinyURLs:

Tinny Urls play a key role in SEO. With the short links users back to your content. Shorten URL links have significant SEO value since SEO is partially about building high quality links. Twitter can also help your Alexa ratings if you are successful in sending users back to your website.

Source

I have been working on few blogs lately and i was trying to increase page view per user on the blogs. I found users visit only 2 pages on average. And the most weird thing is blogger doesn’t bother about page view, they are too busy with Adsense and concern about getting click and making money from it! However, increased pageviews can also lead to more subscribers to your blog rather than people leaving via an advertisement. Increased readership can increase your linkcount, trackbacks & also your online presence via word of mouth.

I tried to put few tips for blogger which might be keep their visitor longer on the blog.

Deep Linking within your Site: If you come to read a particular post via the search engines, chances are that you’re interested in that particular subject. Linking posts on a similar topic or subject together is a great way to keep the user browsing through your blog & content. Comment on previous posts that you’ve written with a link, think of this as how a comedian would refer back to previous jokes to keep the audience gripped.

Don’t Post your Full Content in RSS Format: If it can be helped just keep your RSS Feed to show an excerpt of your posts. Not the whole thing. This stops users from reading the posts in a Reader & forces them to come back to your site.

Refer to the Users not yourself: Capture the users attention & strike a bond with them. Talk about things that could potentially help them in your posts. If they find your blog a useful resource with lots of on point knowledge & information you’ll increase page views easily.

Targeted Traffic: Getting traffic from the engines that is highly targeted to the topic of your blog will increase the overall user satisfaction of your blog. Try to target specific keywords related to the blog & the post in your Title Tag & Copy.

Related Posts: If you’re using Wordpress there’s a nifty little plugin that will allow you to show posts that are related to your current one. This will hopefully allow the reader to find more of your older posts & navigate deeper into your blog.

Good Navigation & Tagging: It’s important to tag your posts & place them in a good navigation system. You can also implement features such as the top 10 most read posts or the featured post plugin

Creating a Series of Posts: Organising your posts into a series will almost certainly attract return visitors. A series could contain any number of posts, each revealing more & more information as time progresses, kindof like a soap opera :p

Responding to Comments: When a user comments on a particular post, take the time & effort to reply to any concerns or ideas. This helps you strike a bond with the reader.

Extra Features: Readers love functionality, polls, gravatars, email subscriptions, competitions all help increase the overall user experience for your blog.

I agree guys this is not all to hold visitors or increase page view on the blog. If you have any suggestion please feel free to leave that on comment, Cheers.

Source

WordPress (WP) is a platform that was designed to embrace search engine optimisation (SEO). The system is built in such a way that the posts and pages are created in categories and tags in which one references the other, forming a well-connected site that guides search engines and helps them crawl the blogs and index them.

WordPress comes with built-in SEO tools such as blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks but third party plugins can also be added to make your WordPress website more search-engine friendly. Here are 10 useful plugins* to optimise your site and boost your website ranking in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

1. All in One SEO Pack: This allows you to customise the metatags from each post and page, create canonical URLs and fine tune navigational links.

2. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress: This creates an XML-sitemap of the blog that is supported not only by Google but also by Ask.com, YAHOO and MSN Search. The plugin automatically indexes all posts and pages of the blog and notifies these search engines via ping.

3. KB Robots.txt: This creates and edits your robots.txt file from the WordPress dashboard. The robots.txt file is the first file that search bots crawl when they enter a site. It can be used to give them special instructions on what to index.

4. Platinum SEO Plugin: This offers everything that the ALL in One SEO plugin offers plus it also issues a 301 redirect to the new location of a page if you change its permalink, also adds an index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir meta tags to posts and pages.

5. Simple Tags: This tag lets you easily generate Technorati tags for the blog, by entering them at the bottom of each post.

6. Dean’s Permalinks Migration: This allows you to change your permalinks without fear of affecting search engine ranks by using a 301 redirect command to notify them of permanently moved links.

7. Permalink Redirect: This compares URLs to ensure there is always only one URL for each blog entry and archives. If there is duplicate content, the plugin issues a redirect. This is very useful so that search engines don’t split pageranks with the same page with a different link.

8. Link rel Plugin: This defines the link relationships between posts. HTML anchors have an attribute “rel” that allows you to specify the relationship the link has to other pages. Although the effect of link relations in search engine ranks is debatable, this plugin makes easy use of this ability.

9. Ozh’ Better Feed: This adds customisable features to WordPress feeds. Many search engines now accept feed submissions and there are many sites specialising in feeds directories and feed services. This plugin lets you add anything to each feed entry such as a copyright notice, read more links and a link for incoming links in Technorati and Google.

10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: This lists all related posts to an article helping visitors looking for specific information that they want more information about. This also helps search engines to dig deeper into the blog.

Installing WordPress SEO plugins and increasing the SEO functionality of your WordPress website will enhance your website’s SEO technical infrastructure and improve your search engine ranking. Increased visibility on search engines leads to increased traffic, a higher sales volume, better brand recognition and increased market share.

Read our article on Wordpress SEO – A Great Tactical SEO Strategy on why using the WordPress platform gives you the SEO advantage.

Graphics Designer

The term graphic design can refer to a number of artistic and professional disciplines which focus on visual communication and presentation. Various methods are used to create and combine symbols, images and/or words to create a visual representation of ideas and messages. A graphic designer may use typography, visual arts and page layout techniques to produce the final result. Graphic design often refers to both the process (designing) by which the communication is created and the products (designs) which are generated.

Common uses of graphic design include magazines, advertisements and product packaging. For example, a product package might include a logo or other artwork, organized text and pure design elements such as shapes and color which unify the piece. Composition is one of the most important features of graphic design especially when using pre-existing materials or diverse elements.

Design can also aid in selling a product or idea through effective visual communication. It is applied to products and elements of company identity like logos, colors, packaging, and text. Together these are defined as branding (see also advertising). Branding has increasingly become important in the range of services offered by many graphic designers, alongside corporate identity, and the terms are often used interchangeably.

Skills
A graphic design project may involve the stylization and presentation of existing text and either preexisting imagery or images developed by the graphic designer

Visual arts
Before any graphic elements may be applied to a design, the graphic elements must be originated by means of visual art skills. These graphics are often (but not always) developed by a graphic designer.

Typography
Typography is the art, craft and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.
Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic artists, art directors, and clerical workers. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users.

Page layout
Page layout is the part of graphic design that deals in the arrangement and style treatment of elements (content) on a page.
I would like to invite people to look into the structure of the article.
Graphic design is the applied art of arranging image and text to communicate a message, or facilitate understanding. It may be applied in any media, such as print, digital media, motion pictures, animation, product design, packaging, and information signs.

Graphic design is a porous discipline, and overlaps significantly with other disciplines, including, but not limited to, the visual arts, architecture, interior design, illustration, photography, human-computer interaction, user interface design, information design and interaction design. Designers may produce ethnographic as part of the qualitative research for defining needs or features for a product, service or communication object. A relatively recent development is the closely related practice of experience design.
Some fundamental principles of design are alignment, balance, color, contrast, emphasis, movement, pattern, proportion, proximity, repetition, rhythm, texture, unity, and white space.

This article has written and posted by our guest writter Frank Boros(SEO & SEM consultant). Frank Boros is working as an SEO expert for seven years.