Only My Mom Loves My Blog”: A Case Study
Part 1
No matter which way you’re generating passive income, you need to be seen as someone with the answers, who genuinely cares about your readers or followers. We’ve talked about natural, organic SEO. This is primarily the heart of your market position –
Here’s a fact:
You can manipulate the search engine results far less than you used to be able to, even three years ago – and that applies to both “black hat” techniques, or white
For example, a recent post on Problogger, “Why Nobody Cares About Your Blog”, unleashed a storm of comments (164 comments). The author, David Risley, was speaking of the importance of speaking to people, not at them. In page after page of answers, 3 common refrains repeated over and over again.
1. An overwhelming number admitted they had low to no traffic – many of them after genuinely diligent keyword research, original content, and several months’ (even years’) work invested
2. Another noticeable, if smaller, segment of this group had noticeably poor communication skills. It was no surprise they had a dismal lack of readership.
3. We can disregard this one, for our purposes: (Each commenter was writing a personal blog just for himself and wrote to say that he or she didn’t care if there was any traffic.)
Checking out several of these blogs, and found some total gems. Of these gems, however, 2 “themes” common to self-admitted “unsuccessful” bloggers emerged:
1. The blogger seems to have made no attempt other than SEO to position themselves to their target market – he or she was not linking to social media, did not have high Twitter or Facebook profiles – and were talking about things relating to their own needs and experiences, hoping to connect
2. Even though the blogger‟s content was superb, the niche he or she had chosen was far too broad. The chances of people finding them organically, as a result, were microscopically small.
Part 2 coming soon
Always Progressing…
p.s. Save Time and money and grab your copy of 7 Proven and Innovative Ways to Earn Passive Income.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Let’s start with how search engines work. You are looking for a boat, so you type that into Google. Behind the scenes, the targeted words or keywords have been categorized by the search engine spiders and put into their database to pop when requested. The database is made up of infinite entries of the web pages that were gathered by spiders or bots and/or human editors. So do the spiders read every page of the web? No. They look through Cliff Notes of each page. Who writes these Cliff Notes? You do, as the designer of the web site. The Cliff Notes take into account the following:
- the name of the web site and particular web page;
- words used in the title of the web page;
- the first paragraph or two of the web page;
- meta tags;
- internet web links and other links coming to the web page.
Optimize means to make as perfect, effective, or functional as possible. Therefore, to optimize your website for search engines means to make your website as perfect and functional as possible to gain higher placement/ranking in search engine results.
Here are a few other terms to know. 
- Natural or organic search – the results from a search engines rules without any payment of any kind.
- Paid Search- the results from a submission fee or bid has been paid to appear in
- Search engine marketing (SEM)- combines search activities natural and paid
Various engines have various rules to how they rank sites. Here are three items all take into account.
Links
- coming in to the site are more important than those going out.
-Links from link farms diminish your ranking
- the links need to be relevant to your site.
Content
- original high quality content
- newer content tend to have higher rankings
Keywords/ Keyword phrases
- Place them in key places on your site.
- Do not use keywords or phrases that are not relevant to your site.
If you have not made it to the first page of Google keep trying and throw in some optimizing.
Always Progressing.
SEO a Little Unnatural?
Search engines love content. It is what they analyze to determine the validity of a webpage and website and with this in mind, some have focused their writing efforts on pleasing the search engine. Is this a good ideal? No. You see search engines don’t buy your products or services, people do. Let’s say you are Jake’s home improvement store and writing an article with the goal of trying to get people to purchase their Christmas tree at your store. ”Decorating your house for the holidays” is the title you have chosen for your article. And this is how the article begins.
Trees are decoration and should be bought at Jake’s home improvement store as soon as possible. When you purchase your tree at Jake’s home improvement store we (the people here at Jake’s home improvement store) will trim your tree and bag it and put on top of your car for your drive home from Jake’s home improvement store to put up your tree.
Not horrid but not smooth by any means and I would not continue reading any further. This is why it’s essential that you write your content for your audience first and the search engines second. It is difficult to combine the two because keywords don’t always fit into an article or blog post naturally.
Here are three steps to write your SEO content and still sound natural.
1.
Research your keywords and keyword phrases. Choose one to focus on in your article and then set it aside.
2.
Time to write, think of your main keyword, but do not try to use it. For example, if your keyword phrase is, “Jake’s home improvement store” then you’ll write an article about how to decorate for the holidays, without worrying about if you’re using the keyword phrase or not. Your entire focus is on writing a quality article for your audience.
3.
Once your article or blog has been written , go back through it and see where the keywords fit naturally. Keeping in mind that there are some things that the search engines will be looking for. In an article regarding “How to decorate for the holidays the search engines will expect some relevant words such as tree , lights, decorations etc. When inserting your primary keyword or keyword phrase keep in mind the places the search engine spiders are going to look.
* Your headline
* Your subheadings
* Your first paragraph
* Your last paragraph
* In the body of the article
TIP When using your keywords aim for a density of about three to seven percent. Anymore and search engines might recognize your content as being keyword stuffed. To determine percentage simply take the number of times you use your keyword and divide it by the total words. Therefore, if you have a 450 word article and you use your keyword 18 times you have a keyword density of four percent.
So what do you think ready to get natural with your SEO?
SEO Mistakes to Avoid
SEO Mistake #1 Not using keywords correctly.
Are you so concerned about being banned from the search engines for keyword spamming or stuffing that you have limited your use of keywords all together? Good news as long as your content sounds natural and reads easily, the chances are you have not overused your keywords.
TIP Make sure your keywords are included in the first paragraph, in your headings and in your title and meta tags.
SEO Mistake #2 Trying to fool search engine spiders.
Search engines are a lot more sophisticated than most of us realize. There are no-no’s such as hidden text, keyword spamming, and cloaking,( which is showing different content to the search engine spiders than to your visitors). These practices serve to hurt your page ranking and can in fact cause your website to be banned by the search engines, which means no one will find you and no traffic means no profits.
SEO Mistake #3 Using Flash
Use Flash if you have a media related website and want to demonstrate your industry savvy. However for most of us, it’s just not necessary and can harm your page ranking. Search engine spiders cannot read content embedded in Flash files, which means they’re not recognized or indexed.
SEO Mistake #4 Using Your Company Name As a Title Tag
Are you branding your company name? If not include it in the title tag, but is should not be the only element in your title tag. Use your primary keyword for each webpage title tag. This is more useful for your customers and helps the search engines identify the various pages on your site.
SEO Mistake #5 Using A Splash Page
A splash page, in case you’re unfamiliar, is a web page with a large graphic or company logo, and a link to enter the site. Reason this is not an effective strategy
* No keyword rich text on the page, nothing for the spiders to index.
* Only one internal link on the page
* These pages often have a redirect which often causes spiders to ignore them
If search engine optimization is important to your business, you may need to forgo the splash page. Your home page should be easy to navigate, content rich, and link visitors and spiders to other main web pages.
The majority of search engine mistakes are reversible. If you’ve committed a few of these mistakes, simply correcting them can increase your page ranking almost immediately. Take some time to evaluate your SEO strategy and eliminate these SEO mistakes.
Avoid duplicate content
When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, there are some definite mistakes to avoid. One of the most common mistakes website owners make is to publish what’s called “duplicate content.”
What is Duplicate Content?
Google defines duplicate content as, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
Most of the time it is not on purpose or not meant to be malicious in origin.
What’s The Penalty For Duplicate Content?
Well loss of page ranking or having that particular piece of content ignored. If you’re trying to improve your page ranking in the search results, duplicate content isn’t going to help you accomplish it. Then what will you ask?
1. Writing and publishing original content.
2. When using PLR, Private Label Rights, make sure you’re purchasing it from a reputable company and that the content is limited to a specific number of users (I like Melissa Ingold ). Make the article your own add your touch to it. Whether you alter keywords, change titles, add a few quotes/ tidbits of data or even share a story related to the article topic.
3. Repackage your own content. Just because you have a 60-page ebook does not mean it has to stay in that format it can be divided into a free report and blog posts. Read through everything you have and you will find that you have more knowledge from more places than you can remember and put it all together you take good and make it great.
Plan your content strategy (niche keywords,keyword phrases, create fresh content) and avoiding duplicate content is easy, especially if you have done your research.
Always progressing……….