Blogs for SEO

SEO-FU

2006-12-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

We figured that everyone would want to see what Cologuy and Greenguy look like and what there special skills are so we have posted our official playing cards below.

As you can see we are a formidable team with only one goal. World SEO domination. (Can you tell it has been a long day filled with a frenzy of end of year activity?)

Business Blogging

2006-05-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

There is no substitute for good content when it comes to blogging, so says Lee Odden is President of TopRank Online Marketing. In a recent post “Optimization for Business Blogs' he lists 14 key points to think about to help bring your business blog up in the ranks where it is currently competing for eyeballs with more than an estimated 27 million new blogs a day.

His key points include:

The importance of Keywords
Optimizing your Template
Using the blog post title as the permalink
Adding RSS and Feed buttons
Optimizing your Categories
Adding the option of Social Bookmarking
Ping, Trackbacks and Comments
Submitting your blog to directories
Link Building
RSS to Email
Blog analytics
Offsite Tracking

This is just a quick overview of his points; to really understand what and why these are the key points read his post Optimization for Business Blogs.

RSS Feed Buttons

2006-05-08T09:31:00.000-07:00

To make it easy for your blog readers to subscribe to your RSS feed you can add ‘chicklets’ to your site. Chicklets are the icons that you see on a blog that when clicked will take a reader to your feed.

While some just open up your own feed, others will send the guest to a variety of feed readers that are available. All they need to do is choose the particular chicklets for their favorite feed aggregator and away they go.

In addition to adding your feed to their feed reader you can also offer them a link to their favorite tag site such as Del.iciou.us, Furl It, or Shadows.

It used to be so simple, one little link that you clicked to “Save to Favorites” but now if you are the indecisive type, you could spend all day figuring out which one to choose.

Quickly make chicklets with an Automatic RSS Feed Button Maker.

Feed Error on WordPress, Page Not Found

2006-04-12T13:51:00.000-07:00

Recently, while setting up a new WordPress blog we downloaded a template that had the following code:

While some of the templates seem to have fixed this problem, we still run across the odd template that has this in the code. When using this particular piece of code we have found that it results in a page error which says basically “Page not found”. With a little research I found out that in fact “feed” unlike “mailto”, “news”, “ http” etc is not a recognized protocol. In order to get the feed to work correctly - simply remove the ‘feed” part of the code.

Your feed is an important part of your site optimization. A recent white paper from Yahoo on RSS feeds talks about the growth of RSS feeds in the online community. On average “Aware RSS Users” subscribe to 6.6 feeds while more advanced users are likely to subscribe to even more. Another fact, from the report says that “Aware RSS Users” claim to spend an average of 4.1 hours a week reading the feeds they receive. If they cannot read your blog from a feed then they will probably not bother.

We recently found that the feed page can also get a page rank, not sure what that means for our overall site optimization, but the Blizzard Internet Newsletter newsletter XML feed page now has a page rank of 4, we believe it to be a good thing.

In order to make sure that the feed works, test it at Feed Validator.

Read the Yahoo White Paper (pdf) on a recent report on the use of RSS.

UPDATE: Here is a copy of the complete line of code so that you can see what Rob is referencing.

<li><a href="feed:<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" title="<?php _e('Syndicate this site using RSS'); ?>"><?php _e('<abbr title="Really Simple Syndication">RSS</abbr>'); ?></a></li>

Analysing Your Keywords for Blogging

2006-04-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

A good way to keep bringing back traffic to your blog is to analyse your keywords that are being searched. What it is that brings people there in the first place? By adding a simple free tracking tool to your site such as Statcounter, Extreme Tracker or OneStat you can see what words people are using to find your blog and start writing more articles along those lines. Your blog becomes a hybrid of what it is that people are looking for and you can cater to those keywords.

If you want to pay for a tool there are all kinds of options and maybe once you start to make some real cash from your site you will want to go that route, but in the meantime a simple free tool would work.

Help on Blogging for Small Businesses

2006-03-29T14:27:00.000-07:00

Discovered a new forum on Small Business Ideas that I thought was worth sharing. They are

"…a community of over 3,000 small business folks from around the world who support and encourage each other as we grow our businesses."

A pretty active forum for those that are looking for advice on Small Business Marketing with an SEO forum, PPC area as well as lots of other great information.

My eyes went to the Blogs and Blogging forum that has some active members talking about blogging and small businesses.

If you are a small business and feel a little intimidated by some of the bigger forums that are full of techies, then this might be the site for you, it seems to be made up of small business owners that are trying to find a way to promote themselves online without using too much technical jargon. They are keen to talk about things that they have tried and experimented with and how they are fairing in the world of online marketing.

Google Domination

2006-02-23T08:47:00.000-07:00

Bob Woodruff from ABC recently visited the Google plex and interviewed Larry and Sergey. This is an interesting look into Googles plan for World Domination. This is actually very similar to the place I work for except we aren't millionaires and we don't get free snacks. Take a look at what they say about the world and what their moto means to the founders. I am skeptical that they actually believe it but its worth a view.

First Ever Links Post

2006-02-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

I am not big on link posts but some interesting reads are here for those looking for reason to use blogs on your website or why comapnies are doing it themselves. Also a couple interesting tidbits.

Russell Savige has a short but interesting piece on why he entered the blogosphere.

Here is another article on the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki from Business Week.

Technorati is trying out a slider, similar to yahoos "shopping/research" slider to help you find authority sites. Does not work great in what I tried it for but it adds a new element to the long tail. The article is here on the Search Engine Journal.

Blizzard Internet, a fairly large SEO/Marketing/Design company that mainly focuses on hospitality, has launched a business blog program for anyone. Eve if your site is hosted elsewhere they can set up[ a blgo attached to your site that close match to your site.

Completely off subject but kind of funny is the Elvis Search Engine. Find anything you ever wanted to know about Elvis right here. Not sure what its good for beyond that but it is kind of funny.

Blogs the Choice of the Next Generation

2006-02-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

Okay so its not Pepsi but Coke has decided to send a team of college student bloggers to Torino to cover the Wineter Olympics there. The blog site is attached to coke and is being used for PR purposes. This of course is one of the big boys finally getting it. Blogs are great for increasing your ranking in Google as well as driving traffic to your site. Something I have been saying for a long time, use blogs on your site or lose traffic. Its starting to happen now, don't get caught behind the curve.

Stop WordPress Comment Spam

2006-01-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

Comments spam for bloggers is like any celebrities political comments during the Academy Awards (insert whatever award show you like here). They take away from the full enjoyment of the show, distract you from the content, annoy you with the inane and stupid comments, and steals all of the power from the event. Comments spam does all of that, most of all stealing the power from your blog. In fact comment spam left unchecked can get your site banned from Google. Software like blogger.com does some things to help like putting "nofollows" on comment links, e-mailing you when you get a comment and the captcha check (captcha is the annoying little picture with letters in it that you have to enter into a box to continue. See picture to the right.) The problem with these is that spammers have moved away from automated spamming to paying people to spam you which means that captcha lets it go sailing on through and then you have to check you email. If you have a big blog checking your mail 3 or 4 times a day can be a royal pain, especially if you get spammed quite a bit. Last I hate nofollows on blogs. They truly break up the conversation that blogs support. I want Google to see that Jim Westergrens has commented on my blog and he has a great site too. It also makes my site more relevant by providing a link to a relevant place.

WordPress of course is not immune to this. That's why today I am doing a review of my absolute favorite comment spam killer called "Spam Karma". This is the best spam program for blogs that I have ever used. The premise is that each comment has a "Karma". This karma is affected by a number of variables such as URL's in the comment, number of comments recently, and if it comes from a black listed IP address to name a few. The beauty of this is that it works really, really, really well. I have had a total of 1 comment spam out of over a thousand get through on WordPress after installing the Spam karma plug-in. The one that got through got moderated very easily and added to the blacklist in seconds. The oriental antique place out of Vietnam won't get a link out of me that easy.

The best part of this spam assasinator is that if your copy blacklists an IP address it is sent to a database, which in turn tells everyone's Spam Karma that the IP address is bad. This means that you not only get the benefit of your own program but everyone else. Its kind of like shared processing, you get the benefit of others computers and experience.

Getting rid of comment spam will help you with SEO on your blog also. Not having it there means less non-relevant links away from blog, more PR kept in your blog, and more time for you to concentrate on making those keywords, descriptions, and posts to help your blog along.

Again, according to Matt Cutts you can use nofollows (or link condoms as they are known in the SEO world) that don't really work. You can try captcha which is annoying and ever so not foolproof. You can get an email with every comments. Or you can install Spam Karma and be done with comment spam (for the most part).

Next WordPress post is on getting rid of those Ugly (myblog.com/?p123=etc) and making them much more search engine friendly. (Trust me it helps). Oh and if you want a question answered please feel free to post a comments and I will get around to answering you as quickly as possible.

Last V7ndotcom Elursrebmem Post for a While

2006-01-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

I have started another blog at www.v7ndotcomelursrebmem.blogspot.com/. This one is only to track the contest and is not in the contest. Just as this blog is not. I will keep it updated at least every two days if not more often depending on what changes (no promises on the weekends).

Last a request. If you want to really push some link juice at the Charity site (http://www.watching-paint-dry.com/v7ndotcom-elursrebmem/) and don't have much to go around, like a PR 4 or lower, you can do two things. Link to the Charity site is number one, then you can also link here. This will help raise this sites PR and push some towards the Charity site. You can freely take down the links at the contest is over. I'm only asking for help with the contest. After that is over do what you want. You could also link to the tracking blog, which also links to the charity site, but that one is not indexed as of yet and has no back links at all. Another way to help is to go and Digg his article at http://digg.com/technology/SEO_for_charity_-_v7ndotcom_elursrebmem_contest_entry Thank you for any help you can give, it will help kids and adults out all over the world.

*****************Update***************
Oops sorry Alek. Good thing its only Yahoo

V7ndotcom Elursrebmem

2006-01-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Blogs for SEO is proud to be competing in the newest SEO contest from V7. The newest keyword is v7ndotcom elursrebmem. We are competing in the contest not for us but for children with Celiac Disease. If you want to check on us the hospital is fully on board with us. If you want to help us help thousands of children all over the world please link to this site http://www.watching-paint-dry.com/v7ndotcom-elursrebmem/ with the text link displaying as v7ndotcom elursrebmem. This will mean the world to kids all over the world and to us, the webmasters, who are competing to win the money for this terrible diseas. Please feel free to post comments or ask questions about what we are doing or why. I will try to reply as quickly as possible. Do not worry we will be back to posting about using SEO on Blogs here shortly but for today we are concentrating on v7ndotcom elursrebmem and making sure this site hits #1 in the SERPs at google. Any help other webmasters can provide will be greatly appreaciated. Thank you.

Optimize Your WordPress Titles

2006-01-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

Okay so you have decided to blog and use it on your website to increase you exposure, traffic, and hopefully conversions. So now you need to optimize your blog, which is easier said than done most of the time. Well we will now start showing you how to optimize you site. This is only the first in a series on how to make your blog search engine friendly. Remember for now we are focusing on WordPress. I will cover other blogging software including Mambo, Joomla, Typepad and even Blogger later.

The title on most WordPress posts is kind of ugly. If this post were in a blog it would show up in the title bar like this;

Blogs for SEO >> Category Name >> Optimize Your WordPress Titles.

or this:

This doesn't do a whole lot. The search engines don't really realize that your title is what this post is about. It thinks that every post is only about Blogs for SEO and its not, well not completely. This post is about WordPress titles, which is what you want to have indexed and show up in the searches. If you are using WordPress 1.5 or later than there is a great option for you.

Optimal Title is a plugin for WordPress that will make the titles show up correctly and without the category name in it (unless of course you are on the category page). Click on the link above and it will take you to the plug in designers page. You do have to be comfortable editing code and using FTP to change your site though so its not for the faint hearted.

There are other tricks but those involve going into the code and also having some PHP ability. I would suggest using optimal title. It seems to be the best bang for your buck so to speak. After you install it it will make yout titles look like this:

Post Title >> Blog Title

or this

******Update*********
WebProNews talks about the same thing here and anry a link to me. What the heck. All they get is a nofollow showing that they could have linked here and given their readers a great resource.

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki

2006-01-10T08:49:00.000-07:00

A new (well new in terms of the web) website has popped up called the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. This is from a couple guys at wired magazine. This wiki is designed to track which Fortune 500 companies now use blogs for their online business. While a business having a blog is not an entirely new idea the idea to keep an eye on a companies blog to track performnce is a fairly new one, at least for the big boys. Companies like General Motors and Boeing using their blogs to generate good PR while also addressing customers concerns and complaints. These blogs, while a manifestation of general popularity of these on line journals, also can create a buzz about the company which in effect is free advertising. The truly suprising thing is how few of the 500 use blogs. While most of the 500 don't need a whole lot of help with SEO or improved rankings on the search engine, they all can benefit from the good PR. With only 19 currently blogging, granted the 19 are the truly big boys, I can only imagine that over the course of the next year more will join those ranks. I would venture a guess that by this time next year that number will be over 100. If its not then the other companies really do not understand the web culture or the need to communicate with the masses in a truly free (mostly) and honest way.

**********************************************
UPDATE
**********************************************
Apparently AT&T plans to acknowledge bloggers in the new year but they don't want to spend any of the $800 million advertising budget on a company blog even though they are trying to appeal to a younger audience. Yeah that makes sense.

Optimizing Word Press Blogs

2006-01-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to write a post on how to optimize a sight for wordpress for a while. It seemed like one of those projects I would get around to when I had a moment. Which turns out to almost never. Thankfully I stumbled across Jim Westergren's Blog. While his entire site is not dedicated to SEO for blogs he has a great post on SEO for Wordpress blogs. While I agree with most of what he says. I only differ from him in one aspect. He says:

Took away unnessary links and put rel=nofollow on some.
You don’t need for example two links back to Wordpress - if you don’t want of course. Also the RSS links I put rel=nofollow on. The less external links you have the better, it means your other blog pages get’s a bigger share of the PageRank

I completely agree with putting nofollows on certain things like rss feeds, trackback links, and the like. I believe that a blog is an extention of a conversation beyond your one site. It is what the web should be. Not static but dynamic with people sharing links. To limit the googlebot to only exploring your site is limiting that conversation. While this makes some sense when linking to a "bad" neighborhood, I don't like doing it in practice. I even think limiting the comments to nofollows is really just an easy fix. On my wordpress blogs I use Spam Karma. I never get spammy comments. There are tools out there for almost every blogging software that will help with comment spam. Limiting the links to nofollows is the easy way for any SEO. Course that just my soapbox talk for the day.

E-Marketing Top 10 New Years Resolutions

2005-12-28T09:55:00.000-07:00

The e-marketing newsletter HotelMarketing.com had an article last year on a Hotelier’s 2005 top ten Internet strategy resolutions. They all still hold true for this year and don’t just necessarily apply to the hospitality industry. Here they are in no particular order with some editing.

1. I will make this year the “Year of Building Interactive relationships” with my customers. I want to own my customers, give them a site that they will come back to again and again.
2. I will make Brand Building on the web a focus of my marketing efforts.
3. I will make Direct-to Consumer Online Distribution the centerpiece of my Internet Strategy. For both hospitality and online stores this means best Internet rate guarantee, website optimization, pay-per-click marketing and among others link creation.
4. I will adopt an ongoing Website Optimization Strategy and turn it into top priority.
5. I will deploy a robust Internet Marketing strategy and turn marketing of my optimized site into a top priority.
6. I will perform a comprehensive Search Engine Marketing Strategy because search engines are an essential component of the online marketing strategy.
7. I will carry out a comprehensive Product Web Strategy to leverage the popularity of my product by making my site the most knowledgeable on the web.
8. I will use competitive intelligence to continually evaluate how my comp is set using the Internet and Direct vs. Indirect Online Channels.
9. I will launch a blog on my site that will allow me to keep my information up to date and relevant to the current news for my industry.
10. To achieve the all of the above I will create a relationship with an experienced Internet distribution and marketing consultant to help me achieve these goals.

HAVE A MERRY GOOGLE CHRISTMAS

2005-12-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

To get in the spirit of the holiday season, check these out:

A Google Christmas Carol

An original poem by Kalena Jordan celebrates some of the “gifts” Google has given to webmasters and internet users in 2005. She even provides a link to music to accompany you. Google Christmas Carol

Decorated Adwords

Do a Google search for candy canes, hanukkah, christmas lights, kwanzaa, christmas or santa and see sponsored ads that have been customized by Google to spice up the page. I’d bet there are some others out there. as well. Can you find them?

Google Holiday Logos

Those who use Google regularly are often gifted with special Google logos. Go to this link to see the official holiday logos that have been used in the past: Holiday logos

Be certain to keep an eye out through the holidays for new surprises.

More Fun with Google Logos

Here are some logos that fans have suggested to Google: Custom Logos

And here is an entire website devoted to Google logos of all types. The unofficial logos are guaranteed to bring a chuckle. LoGoogle

Images in Adsense

John Battelle over at Battellmedia has great post about the images that are showing up in adesense. It could be a trend but for now its very much in the Holiday spirit.

UPDATE
It looks like Google is doing a progressive Christmas logo. I can't recall ever seeing them do a storyline doodle before. If you have missed the last few days go over to the story doodle to see the last 3 days of the logo.

Just a little fun

2005-12-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

Enough seriousness. I found this and had to share. Enjoy.

How a blog can help

2005-12-13T12:03:00.000-07:00

Elleyne VanBryce has great article about how blogs and RSS feeds can help you websites page rank. While page rank is not the end all of SEO, it is one aspect. More important than page rank though is your location in the SERPs. Most of the reasons she states can also help you in the SERPs as long as the link text you have is optimized for the keywords you want. One of the key Issues the Elleyne brings up is;

"A few months into search engine optimization and you’ll get to realize the value of having your link appear in as many places as possible in the World Wide Web."

If you use trackbacks you can start to get links all over the web. (See our articles on "Best Practices for Trackbacks", "Understanding Trackbacks" and of course "Trackback Explained" With the addidtion of an RSS that gets picked up and displayed on a website you can start getting a lot of tlinks fairly quickly. Of course you must be doing things the right way or you will not get the benefit of a blog.

Another point that she makes that is a bit misleading is;

"Blogs are free. Whether you decide to use a web account, like the aforementioned www.blogger.com , or a movable type program which you could upload on your own server under your own domain name, like www.wordpress.com , blogs won’t require any financial burden."

While some blogs are free, if you want a blog that is designed properly you will have to pay for it unless you know how to use HTML andpossibly PHP. There are many different layouts that you can choose from but to make it your individual blog you have to really go in and change the code.

Another problem is hosting. While blogger is free, you gt what you pay for. There is not much in the way choices. The same goes for Movable Type or Wordpress. To get a blog that is truly your own you will need to have it hosted elsewhere. There are companies out there that will design your blog and host it. One that I am most familiar with is Blizzard Internet Marketing which sells all inclusive packages for new blogs.

Five Things That Can Maximize Your Blog Exposure

2005-12-12T11:52:00.000-07:00

Five quick points to remember to help maximize your blog exposure online:

Keep each post to one topic – it helps the search engines categorize the post. If you have more than one thing to talk about make a second entry.

Make your post about 250 words. Less and the search engines can’t really figure out what is going on, there are not enough keywords. More and you will probably loose your reader. Think small but substantial bites. Can’t make it to 250 words. Then bench the idea and come back to it later when you have more subject matter.

Spend about one third of your time on posting well formatted and thought out posts and spend the other two thirds researching other blogs in your space and use their comments to interact with other bloggers, linking back to your own blog – it helps greatly with link building.

Post regularly and consistently, keep the crawlers coming back to see what is updated.

Use categories for different topics. If one topic becomes too big, maybe look into creating another blog specifically for that category. Three months since the last post in one category? Then maybe look at how you can incorporate that category into another and get rid of it, visitors won’t be too impressed if the last post was 4 months ago.

Thanks to industry guru Dave Taylor for these great ideas, just some of the things I learned in his recent Denver seminar on The Case for Business Blogging.

Using a Blog for Marketing

2005-12-08T09:21:00.000-07:00

Garrett French has a great article Adding a Blog to you Article Marketing Strategy. While he talks about mainly using a blog to link to an article on a website he has some great tips for general use.

Personally I think that one of his best points is;

Discuss responses to your article, whether good or bad in blog posts. Show the impact your articles have had on your readers. Show, more importantly, that you're engaged with them.

Many large sites have done this with great response. Many of the auto dealers have done this and it works. Basically you need to make an attempt to engage everyone sho posts a comment on your blog. Bad comments can be even more beneficial than good ones because you can quickly address the problem. If done correctly you cna make a person who is upset much happier. Automatically deleting bad comments and leaving only the good makes your business to good to be true. Of course though abusive comments need to be deleted so that it does not taint the experience of your users.

Why use blogs Part 2

2005-12-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

The Chain of Blogs

Blogs are a powerful tool. They are powerful for the average person who wants to create a website but does not have any HTML experience. They can give the average person a place to speak out in a world dominated by large news companies. They can be a social gathering place for people to talk about things that are important to them. Most importantly though they an extend a conversation from a one blog to many blogs spread throughout the world.

Trackbacks

The real power behind a blog is trackbacks. We have talked about them in the past with our Trackback Tips post and our Trackbacks Explained post. We really have not gone into why to use a trackback though and what they do for your blog.

Extended converstations that can occur on blogs are started mainly by trackbacks. A trackback is a way for a blogger to talk about someone elses post on their own blog. The blogger then can easily and quickly post a comment to the first blog with a link to their own site. This means that the blogger, simply by talking about the same topic and linking to the original post, can gain a link back to their blog. As we all know a quality link is worth its weight in gold.

Of course though spammers know this too. Whenever you do a trackback you need to talk about the same topic and make an addition to the conversation. Bloggers hate to see trackbacks done for no other purpose than a link. If you anger a blogger there is a good chance that you will bring the wrath of the entire blogging community down on you.

Why use Blogs part 1 1/2

2005-11-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

In the interim between the last post on why use blogs and the now I came across the How blogging can help your business on speroforum.com by Hendry Lee. He covers a lot of good ground here and explains, in lesser detail, the same thing we talk about here. One of the more important things he said was;

One of the best things about using a blog with your business is that it can be used in a variety of applications. Started as a simple personal journaling web application, a blog can quickly mature and evolve into a business and marketing tool that some of us can't live without.

This of course may seem a little strange. Many would ask what other applications could a website have other than being a website. The real important thing remember here is that a blog is much mroe than a webpage. While there are other systems out there that can create dynamic content, none of them can do it in the easy way a blog can.

Internal blogs can help with company communications by keeping everyone on the same page. By using the categories (and tags but more on that later) you can organize data into searchable and well laid out topics. I have seen blogs used for time management also. By using the categories you can organize projects. Even keep yourself up to date with meeting minutes and your thoughts by inputing your notes into a post.

For a technology that is really in its infancy blogs have matured into a necessity that almost everyone can use, become reliant upon, and use to boost a companies competitive edge.

Why use a blog? Part 1

2005-11-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

A few people out there may ask why use a blog to help optimize my site? What does it do that other websites can't do? In this series I will talk about what is inherent in blogs that is lacking in websites that makes them a perfect tool for promoting your website. The first topic we will cover is website size.

Size Matters
The size of a website is taken into account by at least google. This does not mean a site with a many pages that has limited content on them is any good either. A site should have lots of pages with good content on each page. A blog is perfect for this.

Each Post a new Page
Each time you make a post a new page is created that can be found a number of ways by a search engine. So each post you make makes the blog one page bigger. If you post on a normal basis, hopefully at least once a day, your blog will make your website at least 365 pages bigger by the end of a year. Talk about easy content building.

Everythings a New Page
Every category and archive page you have also creates a new page for your website. Not only does it create a new page for your website but it creates another way for the search engines to find each of your post pages. If you are using pictures correctly, every picture you add takes the search engine to a page with that picture plus its underlying ALT tag.

As you can see the inherent structure of a blog can make your life much easier when it comes to promoting your website and making it show up high in the SERP's. Next time, The Chain of Blogs.

Full Service Blog Hosts

2005-11-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

Hosting for a blog is not hard to find as Chris Garrett muses about. But what if you want to find one that lets you have all the control you need or want? That can be a tough one. Not many blog host want to let you into the entire code or are scared of you making a mess out of their server. There are a few out there that will let you in and you can host with. I have used three myself. One is Penguin host You can get into the control panel and play with the code. However that is not always what you want. Webmasters.com is one of the few that will give you FTP access onto the server and you can play with the code. I have used this service for a while for different blogs using Wordpress and have liked them so far.