Its is drawing closer to and end, as each day passes in the last of 2010. I think of ways I can improve my blog for now and not just because its coming to 2011. I don’t believe that you should make changes for new years, I believe that you should make changes as soon as you spot what you think will work for the better.
Step back and think about how you can improve your blog
My blog has nearly been running for 10 months. I have so much to offer and in the first 10 months of what i have published, I have been happy with the content. Although I know I can do much better, for some when your blog starts, you really don’t not have an immediate sense of direction, the course of the Internet may change your perception of where your mind is at and what you want to blog about. The nature of courses you buy and then divulge to your blog readers in the form of posts also cause a catalyst effect on what you want to blog about.
So the first thing is 1. Use your Pages
I think a blog naturally to some is all they think of, it simply being a blog. With that said, i mean only going o add new blog post. Why not use your blogs pages attribute for something other than your contact page, about page and terms and conditions. I have looked at my blog and noticed that it would serve me better and my readers much better to have what they need (Basic Guides) directly in the form of pages, key phrases specific, so as soon as they visit my blog, somethings right in front of them that should keep them on my blog for longer and see that i have some valuable unique content to share with them.
OK its a blog, but I don’t want people only returning to my blog because of a new blog post or because they have wants to read an old blog post I published a while ago. I think that guides in relations to what it is I blog about should be readily available to them.
You can use blog pages to publish guides, tutorials, reviews of products and anything else that comes to mind that you would want to be readily available above the fold.
Second Improvement is 2. Blog on related topics to your site
Depending on the nature of your blog I think you should have a clear idea in your mind of the blog posts or pages published that Google expects to see when they come across the nature of your blog. Directly publishing content in relation to that of what Google expects to see when they see the main keywords your blog is related to will help in your blog starting to rank for relevant keywords and bringing in targeted traffic.
Some people may wonder why there blog doesn’t seem to rank for anything. This is main ly because your blog posts are not driving for one key phrase in the blog post, which enables Google to understand the keywords your are trying to rank for.
Related topics will allow your blog to build up its authority and once you have covered every category immediately targeted to a specific key phrase that reigns throughout your blog – this is a sure way that you will achieve a page rank of 1.
2a Be helpful in providing guides on how to do things
As you’ve noticed in the second tip i advised you to blog on related topics in relation to the nature of your site. Maybe you haven’t a clue of the nature of your site and cant really pinpoint it. Well in regards to 2a I will show you how to go about finding related topics to add to your site to allow your site to rank better and give Alexa a reason to rank you better and Google a reason to start to like your content more.
First visit www.Google.com
You will need to visit the google of the country you predominantly target for traffic to your site
type in a main keyword into Google
Lets say i type in Internet Marketing
Look to the sidebar on the left
Select More Search Tools
These are Goggles special tools you can use to see how people are interacting with Google
Select Google Wheel
Google Wheel is like brainstorming of immediate phrases that comes to mind when google produces results for the key phrase you have entered
Example
From these results take a general phrase that is related to your key phrase that you could blog about.
I went with Internet Marketing Strategies
Go to Google AdWords Keyword Tool and sign in
Type in the key phrase you found using Google Wheel
Select “Only show ideas Closely related to my search terms”
Then look for a phrase more specific to the key phrase you found using Google Wheel
In my scenario I went with “Internet Marketing Strategies”
It had a result of a few key phrases pertaining to my search
I then choose went with:
Internet marketing strategies for small businesses it gets 210 Global Monthly Results
Its not a lot of searches, but its a few hundred and due to everyone social bookmarking this is just great to be able to allow a few people share your blog
So now I will blog about that, its in relation to what my blog is about (Internet Marketing) and then i will also find something to affiliate that will help the people that visit my article on that specific title.
3. Write blog posts with SEO in mind and generate back links for it.
Once you write a blog posts, you need to generate some traffic to it. For it to rank immediately for the key phrase you have targeted in it and to give it some life. SEO is not simply getting your domain to rank. Its also getting pages and posts to rank specifically. Although some posts you probably do not have that admiration for them to rank high as they may be quick posts just to feed the search engines with fresh content.
I would advise to make every blog posts a keyword specific blog post with high intentions of getting it to rank for a targeted source of traffic and in return driving them to purchase a product or join your email list or BOTH. 
3a How to write blog posts with SEO in mind and where to go to generate immediate back links
The main attributes that search engines want to see that will allow them to know that your blog is SEO friendly.
They want to see your main keywords in your blog link
They next want to see those keywords in the Title of your blog post or Page
They next want to see those keywords in the first sentence of your blog post or page, preferably bold those keywords and put it in a way that it fluently flows into a sentence. The closest to the start of the sentence the better
They next want to see your key phrase in a H2 tag
They want to see your key phrase within the next 250 words of your blog post or title
They also want to see your key phrase in the last paragraph of your blog post or page.
Bonuses
You can add more of your key phrase in your images:
so in the file name of your image
In the Title of your image
In the ALT of your image
You can add more key phrases using videos correctly
Where to go to generate back links
After every blog post you should submit it to social bookmarking sites. It will not only allow the search engines to index and rank your blog post higher the first time it is crawled, but it may give you immediate traffic as long as your blog post title is great and attractive.
A list of Social Bookmarking sites that you could submit your links to:
(Some of these sites may be down to heavy traffic, they are all do follow (a few are not) and I highly recommend you to submit to them all)
Checked as of 28-12-2010
* Bibsonomy
* LingaGogo
* Mister-Wong
* Spurl
* BuddyMarks
* JumpTags
* MyLinkVault
* CoRank
* A1-WebMarks
* Connectedy
* Bookmark Tracker
* Searchles
* Diigo
* Oyax
* StumbleUpon
* MyPIP
* Delicious <You will need a Yahoo Account to sign up and submit
* Digg
* BMAccess
* Mixx
* Connotea
* SpotBack
* Stumpedia
* SiteSays
That is a really long list, there’s a automated way to bookmark to these social bookmark sites and to more. Remember the importance of this, is allowing a new post or page to get indexed immediately.
Make sure to optimised your social Bookmarks for SEO
Social Bookmark is your way of publicly bookmarking a link that ill be free to share with anyone. With web 2.0 everywhere, it will be easy for people that view your content to share it. Make it easier for you and the search engines by dressing up your Title, Tags and description fields that are required of you when submitting bookmarks.
It would be a good idea to write them up in a notepad file
START > ALL PROGRAMS > ACCESORIES > NOTEPAD
Basically leave the title as it is on your blog post or make sure your keywords are in the title.
Make sure your tags are specific to what your socially bookmarking.
Make sure the description houses your main keywords that your wanting to rank for.
Automated Social Bookmarking Tool?
I’m sure that your now probably thinking of a automated tool that would relieve you of all the work it entails for you to be able to rank better and drive traffic to your site.
There is a bookmarking tool that you should have a look at called bookmarking wiz.
It will automate the process above for you. It saves you time and it is the best auto bookmarking tool on the market. The rest of the auto tools want payment every month to allow you to keep on using there software.
Visit Bookmark wiz to see what im talking about.
Remember you need to get back links for your new posts for it to be indexed in a relatively quick time.
You don’t want to be publishing posts only for them to get index a day or so later, you want your posts to be indexed immediately and at the same time have traffic go to them.
Visit Bookmark wiz to see what im talking about.
Here is “Ways to Improve your blog for 2011 part 2“?
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5 Comments
Hi Mike, yes i do have hard data – you can look at my post and video on the best link to leave when posting a comment – in this video i actually walk through a strategy worth more than its weight in gold. To be specific i walk through how i SEO optimized a page on my blog that is now a page rank 4. I utilized what i described in the text you have quoted.
You wrote: “They next want to see those keywords in the first sentence of your blog post or page.” I know that this is a common way to place your keywords but do you have any hard data that confirms this? Because when I use professional web page optimization tool, it always says that my keyword is too close to the top of the page. And I’m talking about the body text now. Am I missing something here?
@Sire: Thanks for your excellent input.
Subscribe to comments, yes i know of this plugin and your definetely right for me to install this and implement it.
The social bookmarking, I sorry you felt this way.
The thing is Sire people like you and i that run blogs and know of how sharing content can be very helpful to people connected with us via our social mediums are a smaller percentage of the ones that are not in the know how of how improtant it is to share content.
As long as those socail tabs are at your side every point of the way when reading my material, theres a higher share rate than them being at the very end of the blog.
I am going to implement that subscribe to comments. Thanks
Hi Robert, you’ve put this post together very well. It may be a little long for the uninitiated though, especially as it covers a lot of points. Other than that it was fine.
Another way of getting backlinks is by commenting on other blogs, especially on blogs that use commentluv, dofollow and keywordluv. Naturally this will only work if you take the time to leave quality comments.
Now if I could make two suggestions regarding this blog. The first is to install a subscribe to comment plugin so that people are notified when you reply to their comment, this will generally bring them back to continue the conversation.
The second is the placement of those social tag badges you have there on the left. I found it very annoying as it was getting in the way of your post and spoiling what would have been a most enjoyable read.
I hv tried,although it z interesting b very veeeeeeeeery difficult… i think i w’nt b able to do it.
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