1. Under Optimizing Your Website

There are some simple things Google looks for on your site. Find out what your main goal is for your business, find your keywords and implement them in good content. Google will see that you may be useful for someone looking up those key words and rank you higher for them. Avoid a lot of flash, images with content you want read, or dynamic pages because Google can’t physically see them. Make sure your main content is in text so that a search engine robot can actually use it.

2. Over Optimizing Your Website

Now that you’ve found your keywords there are a few things to avoid. One of the biggest concerns is keyword stuffing. Your keywords should be in good content and fit with the page. If you’re putting every keyword you can find into every title, description, and alt tag you have on your page you’re doing more harm than good. Keep it short and direct.

3. Not Enough Incoming Links

The more links that lead to you from other websites the higher your rank will be; your keywords should come from good, relevant content as well as pages that already have a high rank. Many websites were hurt by Google’s new Panda Update because of keyword spamming, spammy link building strategies, and links from unnatural or irrelevant content. Avoid these practices like the plague.

4. No Longevity

The longer your content has been around, the longer your links have stayed alive, and the less your main page changes dramatically the better. Basically, don’t go around changing your title, href’s or alt tags every other day or any other major structure of your website and you’ll be golden. You wouldn’t change the underlying structure and direction of your house everyday; don’t do it on your website either.

5. Not Enough Fresh Content

Yes you shouldn’t make any major changes to your existing content, but you should have new and relevant content for Google to index. Google re-indexes your site regularly so you should try to add at least 1-2 fresh pieces of relevant content a week. The more fresh your site, the better. Most websites do this by creating a blog on their domain which is probably the easiest way to add content that people can share which of course makes more links back to you. This is what makes WordPress and other blogging platforms so great for SEO.

Organic search results can literally make or break your company, and face it, why would you want to miss out on something that literally tells your customers where to go as directly as a search engine? Small business SEO doesn’t have to be difficult but it does take time and it definitely needs to be done. Now that you know what’s wrong you can go fix it and hopefully see your rankings fly. All of these tips are from my experience and opinions. Let me know what you think in the comments.

 Since the internet is now a very large place, there are most likely other sites that contain content which would be very similar to your blog. To ensure that your blog remains at the top of all the competition, you need to take some steps, one of which is developing your blog into something called an SEO blog.
SEO is something that may seem irrelevant for blogs, but whether it is a content website, or a website related to your personal opinions, nowadays SEO is one way to ensure that your blog is noticed by thousands of internet users.

However, making an SEO blog is not as easy as it sounds. There are many things you might have to do which may even involve rewriting a lot of content, restructuring portions of your blog, and even editing titles and headings. Although this may seem like a tedious task, making your blog SEO friendly is a great way to make sure that your blog gets the attention it deserves.

Use Well Defined Keywords

Using SEO strategies to write content can be quite easy for some. Featuring the relevant keywords in the title and using them appropriately in your blog is usually enough. However, do not overuse the keywords, as then they start to seem out of place and can even tarnish the image of your content. This strategy is mainly dependent on how well defined your keywords are. Try to keep one or two words, at most a small phrase, as people using search engines only type in small chunks of text.

Learn From Your Competitors

A great way to make sure that your keywords are accurate is to check out your competition. Try searching for the same keyword on any other search engine and see the top websites. See how they have structured their content and how they have used SEO techniques. Try to implement similar techniques in your own content.

Work Your Way to the Top

Keep in mind that SEO blog increases the exposure of your blog and its content. The blog itself has to be rich in content, informative, useful and very relevant to the keywords mentioned. If the blog is not related to the keyword, the search engines might stop showing your blog in its results and your blog will suffer. Also keep in mind that once your blog becomes one of the top search results, you will have to make an effort to keep it there.
The search results are updated on a daily basis and you should likewise improve the keywords and content of your blog if you want to stay on the first page of search results.

How do you use that traffic? What can you do to make sure you convert, or at least increase the probability of converting on that traffic? There are many techniques that you can try out in order to answer these questions, and one of them is multivariate testing.

What is Multivariate Testing?

Multivariate tests let webmasters, designers, and just about anyone come up with the best version of their website when it comes to conversions. These tests are designed to try out various designs on the actual, intended audience in order to determine which one got the most favorable response by using metrics.

If you’re familiar with A/B tests, then you could think of multivariate tests as being several A/B tests that have been rolled together into one huge run.

Step-by-Step Guide to Multivariate Testing

Now that you know what multivariate testing is and are aware of how it can help your site, it’s time to act on it. Here are the basic steps involved in conducting multivariate tests:

Step 1: Assess your site

A crucial step in the process is to perform a site assessment. This helps you plan out your tests and determine which site elements could use some improvement. It’s recommended that you begin with the basic framework before working into the more complicated elements of your pages so you can do the assessment in an orderly manner.

Step 2: Set goals

It always helps to work towards certain goals, and that’s certainly not an exception when it comes to multivariate tests. “Increasing conversions” is quite a vague objective, so at this stage, it would be helpful if you came up with a clear, concrete, but realistic goal that you hope to achieve with your efforts. For example, your goal could be to increase conversions by 10% in the first month, 20% by the next, and so on and so forth.

Step 3: Design your tests

Since you already have a list of specific elements that you want to improve from the first step, you should be ready to pick several to re-work for your tests. Be really critical of every element that you have to go through, and ask yourself: What would your audience like to see? It’s important to brainstorm for ideas and alternatives so you can present a greater number of relevant choices to your audience when you conduct the test.

Step 4: Do the tests

Going at it manually will involve a great deal of work, so many webmasters just choose to go with multivariate testing tools or work with test providers in order to speed up the process. If you’re still new to multivariate tests, then you can start out with Google’s Website Optimizer. It’s a free and relatively easy-to-use tool that will make conducting these tests quicker and easier.

Step 5: Interpret the data

After doing your tests, it’s time to pull out the data and analyze the results. Which version of your web pages was most preferred by your site visitors? Which modifications actually caused an increase in your conversions? If the results are inconclusive or too close, then tweak your tests and run it again.

Step 6: Implement the changes

After determining the site version that yielded the best results, it’s time to implement that version for your site. The tests don’t stop there, though, as there is always room for improvement. Conduct more multivariate tests when you can in order to continue improving your site and making it better.

By the way, if you are using WordPress for it’s SEO benefits, and haven’t installed Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin, you’re doing it wrong.

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, a little detective work can help you unlock the secrets of those competitors topping you in the SERPs. Basically, the idea is to find out what they are doing and what you are failing to do, and then developing a strategy that takes advantages of your competitors’ strategic weaknesses.

The main steps in this type of research are:

• Studying competition backlinks
• Investigating their social media campaigns
• Taking note of their page design and content

Studying competition backlinks

Link popularity is a vital element in achieving the highest search engine rankings. However, strategic link-building has become more than just looking for as many high PR pages as possible to link to your own pages.

Search engine algorithms now have filters that look for unnatural link profiles to pages that might indicate the possibility of a paid link campaign. For this reason, factors like link diversity are of great importance.

You can examine competitor backlinks using applications like Open Site Explorer to see just what types of link-building strategies they are employing.

Take notice of how higher ranked competitor’s links differ from your own. Categorize the links according to type in order to get an idea of the link diversity strategies employed:

• Highly ranked pages
• Web authority sites
• News sites
• Web directories
• Content marketing sites
• Syndicated newsfeeds
• Award sites
• Infographics
• Social bookmarking
• Location-based services
• Blogs, guest blogging
• Press releases

These are just some examples of the different categories of links sought for SEO purposes. Compare your own site’s backlinks to those of higher ranked competitors in order to see if any changes in your link-building strategy are necessary. Additionally, look at factors like anchor text and link types to see if they are doing something that you are neglecting, in most cases we’ve researched less focused link campaigns on exact match anchor produce better results. So going for branded terms, long tail and main keyword variations is the best way to go, just like with the type of links, diversity of anchor text is as crucial.

Investigate competitors’ social media campaigns

Social media is all the rage today and, increasingly, search engines like Google and Bing are using social connections to help deliver search engine query results.

Since this is a new frontier in terms of SEO, it is important to snoop on the competition to see if they have discovered any effective techniques for mining social media’s vast potential. Services like NameChk (http://namechk.com/) and Knowem (http://knowem.com/) allow you to make a quick check on which social networking platforms that competitors are using.

One of the ways in which search engines are factoring in social networks to deliver query results is by giving added value to pages that appear in community interaction. For example, someone in your Facebook friends network shares, likes or comments on a specific page with a topical focus on new electric vehicles. When you or someone else in the same network search for “new electric vehicles” on that search engine, the page just mentioned may rank high in the SERPs because of the Facebook friend connection.

Study what the competition is doing especially on larger social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but also pay attention to what they may be up to on smaller social media platforms. Here are some items to look for:

• How frequently do they update their social media profile pages?
• What types of content do they post?
• Do they interact with others in their online communities?
• How do they integrate their social media pages with their actual business website?
• What do their networks look like? What types of friends, fans, etc. are they engaging with on these platforms?

Page design and content

Do not forget to study competitor’s page design and content when conducting your research. Some important things to look for are:

• Link structure – Check for number of internal and external links along with relevancy of these links.
• Anchor text – What are the keywords in the anchor text? Are the anchors long or short?
• Keyword density – Do not forget this standard SEO factor.
• Multimedia content – Does the page include images, videos, Flash presentations, etc.
• Tags – How does the page handle keywords in tags.
• Related keywords and phrases
• Paragraph and sentence structure – Check for use of headings, bullet lists, etc. Does the page use bold or italicized fonts to highlight words?
• Content – Look for particular types of writing styles and word usages that differ from your own.

When compared against your competitors, you will be able to find subtle differences, or not so subtle, that may help you improve your current strategy and tackle on the giants that are dominating the first page. But even though the article starts with links, you should start with content on your site. As no matter how genius your link campaign and promotion skills may be, if there is nothing link worthy on your site, the campaign will eventually fail. So invest in content first, then work your way from there.

Google Search Marketing

1) Local Keyword List Generator

5minutesite.com offers an incredible local keyword list generator on their website to help you figure out exactly what geographic regions you should be targeting. Enter in your business’ zip code, the radius you would like to target, and your keywords, and 5minutesite’s tool will generate a list of all of your keywords paired up with city names and zip codes from anywhere within your radius. This is extremely useful for creating a list to bring into the (also free) Google Keyword Tool to determine which terms are getting searched.

2) Google Places Category Tool

Mike Blumenthal, considered one of the industry’s foremost local SEO experts, has created a nifty tool for making sure that you locate the best categories for you to use when submitting your business to Google Places.  Users simply enter in the keyword they would normally use to describe their niche, and the tool does the rest of the work, showing you related categories and synonyms.  Mike has also expanded the tool to include categories for international versions of Google, and accepts partial string (i.e. search for “dent” to find categories relating to both “dental” and “dentist”).

3) Local Citation Finder

Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder is perhaps the most well-known local SEO tool on the market, but you would be surprised just how many people forget to take advantage of the free version of the tool.  Enter in your geographical information and a keyword, and the tool will come back with a report of valuable citation opportunities for that keyword/locale.  Enter in a competitors’ telephone number, and the tool will help you find all of the citations that competitor has (which you can then pursue).  The free version allows up to 3 searches per day, and Pro membership starts at just $20 per month.

4) Local Search Toolkit

The Local Search Toolkit from seOverflow is another amazing tool that is in the same vein as Whitespark’s.  Enter in local keywords that you are targeting and the toolkit will come back with a list of the top local results for that keyword.  From there, you can see a wealth of information about the companies that rank well for these keywords, including the categories they are submitted to, their local citations, how many reviews they have, any videos associated with the account, whether or not they are verified, and their geographical distance from the geographic location, making this one of the most robust free tools on the market.

5) Geo Sitemap Tool

51blocks.com’s free Geo Sitemap Tool is a handy way to generate a KML file for you business’ website.  Enter in your business name, address, phone number, and website and the tool automatically generates geo sitemap and XML files for you to upload to your root directory and verify in Google Webmaster Tools.  This helps services like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Maps for Mobile understand exactly where your business is.  The page also has information about how to correctly format your business name, address, and place on your website using proper Schema.org markup.  Truly a valuable little tool to help optimize your website for local search.

One of the most unique features of Facebook Commerce is the capacity to tailor your marketing based on the interests of the Facebook user. This means that you can much more successfully target consumers in your demographic which will increase the likelihood of a sale (Read “SEO”). It is all about having the necessary skills to effectively manage your Facebook Commerce campaign and creating compelling content specifically tailored to consumers who are, in most cases, already interested in your product(s).

Adding Facebook Commerce as a friend

When it comes to targeted sales campaigns, it is safe to say that Facebook Commerce will be one of the best friends you will ever have. Needless to say, most users of Facebook will be distracted by the activities of their friends – so, any Facebook Commerce campaign needs to be suitably compelling and visually appealing so as to attract their attention and generate a healthy click through rate and ultimately a conversion.

Finding an agency with extensive knowledge of the social media marketing field and who know what it takes to craft the sort of advertising campaigns on Facebook Commerce that will make a big difference to your sales figures is likely to be one of the most important undertakings that your business can pursue over the next 12 months. After all, with 500+ million users, there’s definitely going to be many potential customers for your products on Facebook.

Different people, different skills

The starting point for all SEOs wanting to build a better relationship with web developers and web designers is to understand that each role focuses on different skills. I have often come across SEOs who think they know best when it comes to coding, web developers who think all requests made by the SEO team are a waste of time and effort and, finally, web designers who think great design and user experience alone are the only elements of a successful website.

In a nutshell, don’t always assume you know best, leave development and design to the experts and, if you have any particular requirements from an SEO point of view, make sure these are explained and agreed at the beginning of the project.

Understanding each other’s areas of competence

Having worked with large teams of developers and designers for a number of years, I have learnt one important lesson: disagreements and misunderstandings are often the result of simply not having a clear idea of what the other teams do. The best way to tackle this from the point of view of an SEO consultant is to organise some SEO training sessions for other teams within the agency or company and invite them to do the same so that you can learn what they do.

Keep the sessions brief and focus on the elements of SEO which you think are most important to developers and designers so that next time you make a particular request, they will know exactly why and what the benefits for the clients are.

Even better, you can even create reference guides or guidelines so that your colleagues have a document they can quickly refer to if needed.

Great user experience will lead to great conversion rate

The basic goal of any SEO campaign is to increase the volume of traffic to a site, however, without user-friendly design chances are that all the extra visitors you manage to bring in will likely leave the site immediately and not convert.

As much as SEOs like text-heavy pages and optimised internal links, my experience has taught me that designers should always be involved in the conversations regarding on-page SEO: this will ensure that any changes made in order to optimise the website do not affect the user experience which, as a result, will lead to more traffic to pages that generate more leads and sales.

Cooperation is key

There’s a wide range of SEO tasks and projects which could really benefit from the input and help of web developers and designers. As an example, just think of link bait campaigns such as infographics and the development of widgets.

Involving all teams in brainstorming sessions and before major decisions are made can open up a wide range of opportunities, new ideas and also prevent any future complications with any project.

Better cooperation and communication between the SEO team, developers and designers not only will ensure that all work is carried out on a website in a manner that focuses on the best practices of all areas, but ultimately it will also lead to happier clients as they see everything’s being taken into account to achieve online success.

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page^[1] and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E). – Wikipedia

If that quote from the Wikipedia article about PageRank doesn’t make any sense to you, then this article is for you. (And if you did understand it, I think that this article will benefit you as well – but in a different way. )

In it’s simplest form, Google PageRank is a lot like democracy. Websites are both the candidates AND the voters, and he who gets the most votes wins; in the form of top placements within SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). To put it more simply – if a lot of other sites have a link to your site, you have a good chance of showing up within the top ten results of a Google search. Now, that is a VERY basic way of putting it, and there are a lot of gotcha‘s in there to trip you up – but that is what it all boils down to.

How is PageRank calculated?

PageRank is calculated using a patented algorithm that is constantly being tweaked, so no one can really say for sure how, but there are a lot of good ideas out there about it. What we as webmasters DO know is this – the more sites with relevant content and PageRank that link to your site, and the more relevant sites that your site links out to, the better your site’s PageRank will be. Also, it seems like Google is working on a much more dynamic / live pagerank system – we’ve seen PageRank for a specific site fluctuate up and down a whole point in the matter of a couple weeks, and then back to where it was. Now, remember I said there were some gotcha’s?

So what are some of the gotcha’s with PageRank

PageRank can be manipulated. It used to be VERY easy to do, but Google has consistently improved their algorithm to combat some of the common tactics that people use.

1. Bad links – Years ago – when I first got into SEO, PageRank, and all that jazz – I used to think that bad links were just dead links on your site that didn’t go anywhere. While those should be avoided at all costs, since they effect text to code ratio with no benefit to your site, there is an even more sinister side to bad links than that. You as a webmaster need to be careful what sites your website chooses to link to. If you knowingly link to a bad site that has nothing to do with the gist and content of your site, Google knows this, and will ding your PageRank a little. To follow the political reference – if you vote for a crooked candidate, it makes you look bad. Resolution? Avoid linking to websites that do not offer valuable content that is related to the purpose of your website.

2. Spamdexing – Spamdexing is a complicated subject – and has caused a lot of controversy in the past. There was even a lawsuit about it. It consists of automated “link generation” tools, hidden text, keyword stuffing, cloaking, and page hijacking for the sole purpose of increasing a sites PageRank, among other things. It’s kind of like stuffing the ballot box or rigging the election. You might win, but once you’re found out, it ain’t pretty. Resolution? Don’t do it! Use legitimate methods to build your sites PageRank – the long-term results are MUCH greater than the short-term rewards.

3. Duplicate Content – Duplicate content is a big problem these days. There are content farms galore feeding the same or highly similar articles to autoblogs all over the internet for the sole purpose of increasing their advertising revenue and amount of content on their site. Google is smart enough to know if your site consists of nothing but content scraped from other websites, and will adjust your PageRank accordingly, or simply drop you from search results all together. Resolution? Focus on creating unique, relevant content for your readers that they think is good enough to share or bookmark, and Google will see your site as increasingly more relevant for your topic of choice and reward you accordingly.

If you as a website owner and content creator knowingly participate in these practices, you’ll get what’s (unofficially) called a “Google Slap” where one day you’ll be at the top of results for whatever you are targeting, and the next day you’re nowhere to be found. That is why it is imperative that you play by the rules and do things the right and respectable way.

There are many more facets to PageRank that could be covered, and will be covered in the future here on this blog, but I think you’re starting to get the picture. While relevant, PageRank isn’t the be-all end-all factor when it comes to a successful website. Creating unique, engaging content that interests readers and offers value is what the web and Google is all about. Follow that, and you’re site will get ranked in no time.

Expectations and Prep-work

1. Write about what you know
2. Post as much as you can
3. Don’t get started unless you have the time to finish
4. Don’t do it for the money
5. Blogging should be a hobby, not a frantic attempt for cash
6. The bloggers who succeed are those who know what they’re doing
7. Don’t fall for the John Chow Effect
8. The only secrets to blogging are consistency, and originality
9. Sadly, more posts beats larger posts
10. Focus on content, and the rest will come

Setting Up your Blog
11. Read blogging tips blogs, pretty much anybody on this list is good.
12. Create the essential accounts, twitter, stumble, digg, feedburner, google…
13. A good design is important, but a bad one won’t destroy you.
14. Prepare yourself for a roller coaster of success and failure
15. Use wordpress, not blogger.
16. If you know how to get your own domain
17. Write as many posts while you’re in the mood, because there will be those days…
18. Start networking right away.
19. Read this article
20. Study a little, these topics in this order, CSS, HTML, SEO Traffic Generation, Social Networking, and Social Media.

Essential Plugins (for WordPress)
21. Top Commentator List
22. SEO All in One
23. Not a plugin but use the latest version of WordPress and keep updating.
24. Comment Luv
25. If you’re picky about comments, Keyword Luv
26. I love Social Book Marking
27. Large RSS and Email Subscribe Buttons
28. Akismet! It’s blocked 450,000+ spam comments on here
29. Full Text Feed
30. Google XML Sitemaps

Content
31. Make content your focus at the beginning, not marketing.
32. Set up a recommend/featured posts set up, so that you can advertise your top posts.
33. Write in lists and use pictures
34. Conduct lots of reviews, studies, and polls
35. Use lots of links, to yourself, and to other bloggers
36. If it’s under 500 words don’t post it
37. Humor is ok, as long as you’re still giving them good information
38. Read some stellar posts so that you get an idea on how to do it.
39. Bold and Italicize your keywords, this helps catching the readers eye, and the SE spiders like it.
40. Use spelling and grammar checks

Marketing
41. Comment like crazy
42. Look for free links like Q/A posts, or top commentator lists…
43. If you have good information to share, share is as good information, not as obvious spam, The Secret to Millions Online
44. The best way to get quick links, is through sponsoring a popular contest
45. Learn How to Comment successfully
46. Learn Popular Social Media Sites
47. Email people, and have a contact page.
48. Read and study. Learn from the experts, and other people’s failures.
49. A Failure is better then never even trying. Because then you’ll probably succeed next time.
50. Accept that some posts will do better then others, and market those ones.

SEO
51. Use the SEO All in One tool. I know I already said this, but use it from the beginning, that way you have meta tags, and descriptions on every post.
52. You don’t need to be an expert on SEO to be able to use it, learn the basics and you’ll be fine.
53. Use comments for SEO purposes
54. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to choose your keywords
55. If you’re in this for the long run, aim for popular keywords now. It’d be annoyed to have to re-optimize later, for a different keyword.
56. Make your title tag your top keyword, and put that keyword in your meta description and keywords for your homepage.
57. Use beginner and advanced squidoo tips, to bring traffic and Link juice to your site.
58. Google respects powerful sites. Just keep focusing on content , and dont‘ use too much flash, and you won’t be sandboxed.
59. Google isn’t the devil people make it out to be. They’re just scared of it, because they don’t understand it.
60. If you comment enough, then all your posts will be added to google anyway. You don’t need to worry about submitting your posts to it, and don’t’ waste your money on those people saying pay them to add your site to search engines.

Traffic Generation
61. Social Media is awesome, and highly successful. Learn Digg and stumble!
62. Comments bring traffic.
63. Guest posting brings traffic, links, and markets your site. This is one of the best ways to market your site.
64. The Viral Effect can happen to anyone, at any time. Be prepared with either a big enough server or run away from digg, cause it’ll blow.
65. Word of mouth/email is still the best way to get traffic. You need your readers to be telling other people about your site.
66. Use Press Releases, and take advantage of current events to be the first to be writing on your evolving niche.
67. Use forums on your niche to your advantage. And don’t be afraid to ask questions on this.
68. Use your connections to market your site/products.
69. Sell something that’s really good. Spend a while on an Ebook and give some free promotional to start the viral effect rolling, and get the traffic flooding in.
70. Try the new rage, Video Posting

Stat Trackers
71. Alexa and technorati are both awful and misleading, try not to use them when you’re analyzing sites.
72. Though still skewed, siteanalytics is a good way to compare site’s traffic.
73. Use websitegrader to give you useful information about your stats, and site SEO.
74. Get listed in lists like 45n5′s and Winning the Web’s.
75. Use every stat tracker you can find.
76. Every stat tracker will be different, but analytics is the most trusted.
77. Aweber isn’t legit, don’t use it, and people don’t trust it. People use it to try and say they get hundreds of visits a day, but it’s not true.
78. Feedburner is the best feed stats tracker.
79. Use these tools to get untrue and unrealistic monetary values of your site.
80. Understand that visitors are not what makes a blog, but it’s active readers that create a community.

Monetizing
81. Have a creative original 125×125 ad.
82. Have an original site slogan that people will remember.
83. Don’t do it too early.
84. You can always monetize later, but monetizing too early can greatly hurt your site.
85. Ebook sales are awesome, once you have a popular enough blog.
86. Don’t try and sell something you don’t know.
87. Monetizing = Marketing You’ll only sell as much as you can market it.
88. Private ads are the top money makers for most people.
89. Affiliate Marketing can be a huge money maker if you know how to do it.
90. Sponsored Reviews and PPP, programs like that destroy your Page Rank. Be careful what programs you start up.

Extras
91. An About page is not an essential, but you should make one if you can.
92. A Contact Me Page you Need!
93. Advertise pages are more then just for buying advertising. I read all advertise pages just to see what type of stats they have, and which ones they use to get an idea of the blog. If you see them relying too much on illegitimate sources you can realize how important money is to them.
94. Patience and Perseverance are critical to succeeding on the internet. You’ll probably need to wait a while awhile before you will see anytime of monetary success.
95. Use Google Reader to stay informed.
96. Learn twice as much as you write. This way you always stay a step ahead of your readers, and have an inexhaustible amount of posts to write.
97. Don’t let stat results get you depressed. Good content combined with time, will always succeed, eventually…
98. Getting the first 100 subscribers is the hardest. After that, it only gets easier.
99. Have a good archives system set up, so that people can find the posts they’re looking for.
100. People Love Freebies! Give as many freebies as you can.
101. I got this post idea from Thoushallblog’s 101 blogging tips list. Make sure you check out his as well, because he has some great stuff on there, that I didn’t cover.
102. Stay One Step ahead of the other bloggers in your niche.

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So what are the benefits, and what do you have to do? First of all, Don’t submit any article that aren’t quality. You don’t want your name on something that isn’t good work.  Another thing you DON’T want to do is submit duplicate content, especially stuff you haven’t written. This is bad for your article, and just bad all-around. So don’t just copy other’s material. One useful technique that I’ve found and utilized when I don’t have the time or I don’t want to take the effort to write an article from scratch is this: Find an article that looks good, read it over and make sure it has some good content. Then you cut and paste the article into Google Translator, and translate it into German (you don’t have to do German, I’ve just made a habit of using it because I’ve found it goes back into English smoothest). Once you’ve got it in German, copy it again, and translate it back to English. Go through the article and clean it up, because translator doesn’t always do a great job of going into smooth English.

Make sure that in all your articles you link back to your site, preferably with a hypertext link. If the article site doesn’t accept HTML, then just paste in your URL. This will ensure you get at the least a quality one-way link back to your site. And as any competent Internet Marketer knows, quality one way links are what paves the road to number one Google listings.

1. Don’t Go Off Topic

I don’t care if that’s what you’re thinking about at the moment, you can’t suddenly starting writing about cars, or posting music videos, if your blog is about How to Blog and SEO. You confuse your readers, and distract potential subscribers, because you aren’t giving them what they expected. Doing this can have a very drastic effect on your readers, even people who are fans of your site. And just because people liked it once, doesn’t give you license to do it again. Just stay to your niche, and target readers who want what you’re giving. If you jump around too much it’s very hard to get, and keep, a consistent reader base.

2. Don’t Ramble

I realize you’re struggling with what to write, but if you don’t have enough ideas to write about, don’t try and make up for it by talking a lot. Less words is always better! Bloggers want it short, quick, and too the point. So don’t get distracted with minor points, and stick to your topic.

3. Don’t Rant

Forget about John Chow, ok and Carlocab, ok and lot’s of other popular bloggers as well. Just because some people have had success ranting doesn’t mean you can. It’s very difficult to make people care about your rants, because you need to be somebody first. Very few people rant their way to success. But when you have success, then you’re allowed to rant though I wouldn’t recommend it… A post is supposed to be an informative article like a newspaper article. Decide before you create your blog if you’re going to make it into a ranting blog, or a information sharing blog, and then stick to it. Don’t try and mix the two.

4. Don’t Bring your Issues Into It

I’m sorry you’re really struggling with something, or annoyed with somebody, but to be perfectly honest, We Don’t Care. I’m sorry you’re hurt, but I’ve got my own life to live. That sounds harsh but if you want to keep your readers, then just follow my advice. If you want to Rant or Complain, then make a political opinion blog, or a personal journal blog. And then say whatever you want, but don’t bring your life struggles into an information blog, because people just get turned off.

5. Don’t Settle for Small Unoriginal Posts

If you’ve got nothing to say, then don’t waste our and your time trying to say it. Stop trying to write, and go figure out an idea, and then come back and write it. If your post is under 300 words or if it doesn’t state any new thing new or original, then it’s probably not worth posting. Be strict with what you post, you will see results.

6. Don’t Pitch Old News

If you’re writing a post that has already been made popular by some one else, then don’t try and jump on the success band wagon. Not only will you probably fall on your face, but you look dumb trying to sell somebody else’s idea. You’ll lost all your credibility, and people will not want to read your site.

I’m assembled these ideas into a Bullet List post for you to follow. Print it out and make a sticky note, and put it next to your computer or something. They will keep you from making your bad day even worse, by losing your visitors from your blog.

1. Stay to your Niche

2. Stay to your Post Topic

3. Keep your head

4. Don’t let feelings shape your posting

5. Don’t waste the Readers time with uninformed Posts

6. Don’t try to sell Old Information

A squidoo lens is a great SEO and traffic building tool, but it’s probably more powerful than it looks at first glance. If you write an aritlce make a lens, link to your site, and then leave it, you are not using squidoo to it’s full potential. You are missing out on a powerful and authoritative one-way link from a high-ranking website. Yeah, I know, sounds a bit propaganda-ish, but there is a lot of truth in what I just said. Let’s take a look.

A squidoo lens should be considered a whole webpage of it’s own. Believe it or not, squidoo lenses get high rankings in Google. If you play your cards right, you can ramp up the authority of your squidoo lens in Google, and then pass that authority on to your site with a link. So how do you build up the authority of your lens?

(1) Well, how do you build authority to any site? In fact, what’s the point of having a squidoo lens in the first place? That’s right, links. So, just like any site (which is how you should treat your squidoo lens) that you’re trying to get to rank well in search engines and in general, you get links. It really doesn’t matter how, but link-building is a great way to build authority to your lens. You might try submitting to a few site directories, or linking from a blogger you created for that purpose.

(2) Another great way to build authority, as always, is with social media. And, as always, it comes with a double bonus: links AND traffic. Bookmarking is probably one of the best ways to get authority to your site in Google’s eyes. A few words that should help spark your memory… digg, del.icio.us, sphinn, reddit, stumbleupon, and all that other good stuff. Just bookmark your article (this is where having a good article comes in handy, because the better the content, the more likely it is that people will like it. The more likely that people will like it, the more likely they are to bookmark it, and then you get all the goodies… i.e. traffic and links).

So now you’re working to get your squidoo lens to rank number one in Google, and you’re trying to pass it as much authority as you can. Here are some more features of squidoo you can utilize if you want to drill down and really stretch squidoo to its full potential.

(3) Another good thing to do is add more relevant tags to your lens. Squidoo has you create 3 initial tags, but you can add more later, up to 40 in fact. These can be multiple word phrases, or individual keywords. Take advantage of this. When you create tags, it gets some internal linking going around the squidoo server, and Google loves links, including internal linking. Essentially, that means this for you:

lots of tags = happy Google

A good equation if you ask me. If you already have a lens, just go to your dashboard, go to the ‘My Lenses’ tab, and click the ‘Edit’ button. Once the page has loaded, you should see a sidebar pop up on the right, with your text modules, introduction modules, and RSS modules on the left. In the sidebar on the right there should be a ‘Tags’ option. Click the orange edit button directly to the left, and then add some relevant tags.

So, that does it for this post. If you poke around on squidoo for a while, you’re bound to turn up a lot of interesting info; it’s actually quite a nice little site, besides its uses for the internet marketer and blogger. Feel free to ask any questions you might have about the post, or topics raised by the post, I’d be happy to try to answer as best I can.