Does the mere mention of “Search Engine Optimization” make you scratch your head? Do you have no clue what makes for a well written SEO content? That’s where we come in.

SEO and Search Engine Optimization Content Writing is one of the many things we do well. We can write the content for you, get you submitted to the search engines, link building and more. Who wants bad SEO? Who wants to be listed several pages hack in search results?

Sometimes it really is best to spend a little money and let th professionals help you out, and with something as vital as SEO, this is one of those times.

PageRank and Alexa both serve purposes, but both have their detractors to how inaccurate they can be. This is why you need to verify what’s going on with your ranking independently so that you can make any needed adjustments. Using a company like WebPosition will let you verify what you’re seeing, and most times you will find you have an inaccurate picture of the truth.

Without good blog seo, your site is doomed to failure, so it’s always worth it to spend a few dollars and see what really is happening out there in cyberspace in regards to it.

Do you know how people are finding your blog? What keywords are they using? Are they coming in from an email campaign or cost-per-click program?

These are all things you need to know, and that’s why you need an analytics system to study what is going on with your site. If you see a keyword is bring in an unexpected amount of traffic, you can adjust some of your future entries to make sure you focus on that keyword again. This should, in turn, increase pageviews, and grow your search rankings.

The reason companies like HitsLink are better than some of the free alternatives is… well, they aren’t free. They have incentive to keep growing their offerings and staying on the leading edge of technology. They also tend to focus more on conversions than most, letting you know just how successful your ad campaigns really are.

This is essential to running any successful site or blog. If you don’t know your visitors, there’s no way you can tailor your offerings to them.

There is nothing more important in the blogging world than good SEO (search engine optimization). How in the world are people ever going to find your blog out there if you aren’t properly ranked in the search engines? And trying to learn what to do to get properly indexed can be a nightmare.

That’s why the world invented books and software to help you, don’tcha ya know.

On the book side, I’d say one of the best out there would have to be SEO Book, A 328 page ebook that you can download right away and get to work the SEO gurus swear by. Best of all, if you don’t see actual improvement in your listings, they have a money back guarantee.

For software, the standard and professional editions of the WebPosition 4. These all-in-one packages will take most of the heavy lifting off of your shoulders, and do the work for you. They’ll report your current standings, suggest keywords, submit your URLs and more.

What are you waiting for? Don’t you want to get more traffic to your site?

Is your blog SEO reaching the 79% of adults that are now online?

According to a new study, nearly 8 out of every 10 adults is on the web for up to 11 hours a week. That’s a good amount of time for them to possibly be finding your blog, and learning about your company.

Without search engine optimization, it’s not going to matter how many people are online, because the will never find you. And considering the labyrinthine like qualities of trying to get good SEO, that’s why it’s a good idea to sometimes turn to search engine optimization services like what we offer. Sometimes it’s a matter of weighing the learning curve vs cost, and, if you’re anything like me, you just simply don’t have the time to sit down and “reinvent the wheel” when someone has already created a perfectly good one.

You can write your heart out on a blog, but if no one visits it, does it really matter? Sure, your content should be enough to draw your readers in, but how do you get them there the first time? There are 10’s of thousands of new blog created every day, how do you not get lost in the shuffle? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the first line in that battle.

One of the first steps you can take is trying to cram as many keywords as you can in to an article, but try to do it in a natural fashion, you don’t want to be too obvious. How do you know what keywords you should aim for though? Luckily there are two good free tools out there for you to get started with.

First up is the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. This one uses Yahoo’s results and tries to predict what is going on at Google and MSN. Not 100% accurate, but will give you a good general over view.

Then you also have Google Trends which will allow you to enter up to five words and compare them to each other. This one will only let you look at Google’s results, but in this day and age, the others are just nice add-ons compared to the king of the search engines.

So I’m not saying go nuts and put in every keyword you can think of, but try to get a coupe in to each post if you can.

I talked the other day about how tempting it is to sell text links, but I would suggest against it. Well, sadly, I have been proven right.

According to information from Search Engine Journal, Google has confirmed via email that they are in deed penalizing sites for selling text links.

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

In short, no matter what you may think of Google, they account for 60 - 90% of search traffic depending on the country you look at. You can’t afford to damage your reputation with them in any way, so make sure you stay abreast of the latest developments, such as this one.

Last month, amidst much fanfare, DMOZ started a blog. Since then - Sept. 24, 2007 - they have made (count ‘em) three blog posts. Whoo-hoo!

So far, the DMOZ editors have tackled such important issues as The Search For DMOZ, dealing with DMOZ in the search engines, and Why Hasn’t My Site Been Listed in DMOZ, an attempt to explain why it takes forever for DMOZ to list a website in its directory, the No. 1 complaint among people who want to be listed there.

I covered DMOZs initial charge out of the gate. Was I skeptical? Sure. Still am. Do I have reason to be? Three blog posts says so.

Why so hard on DMOZ? Well, because you can’t start a blog and post to it three times in half a month and expect people to take you seriously. Maybe DMOZ editors have so much to do that blogging is not on the list of highest priorities. Judging by their initial enthusiasm, however, I’d say that wasn’t the case.

DMOZs blog posts fall on the defensive side according to their tone. Just read the last post and you’ll see what I mean. Everything sounds like a defensive position. DMOZ editors are so bent on proving something that the only thing they seem to be proving is that everyone else is right. Besides, they don’t post every day. Bad for SEO.

I know calling people cheapskates sounds a little harsh, but if you are being pennywise and pound foolish, you need to rethink your blog marketing strategy.

Yesterday we talked about domain names in part 1. Today, in Part 2 we will go over blog hosting.

First let’s talk about free hosting for blogs. Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, and others will let you set up your blog on a subdomain of their domain name at no charge.

Remember the phrase there is no such thing as a free lunch. Free hosting for your blog may sound like a good idea but there are some serious drawbacks to using a free host.

1. You have to abide by their terms of service. That means they get to make the rules about what you can or cannot do on your blog. While you may have never had a problem with your blogger blog or your blog at wordpress.com or other freehost, it does not mean you will not have one in the future.

What if they decide to change their terms of service? They do not have to notify you of anything. The rules can change without notice. They can say you can’t have any advertising except adsense. They can say you cannot blog about google or wordpress. They can say anything they want because they make the rules.

With your own domain name and hosting, you get to write your own terms of service. You are in charge. You make the rules.

2. Web surveys have said publicly that 70% of the blogs on free hosting like blogger.com are spam blogs. Likely you are in the 30% of legitimate blogs, but you are associated with the spam blogs because you are on the same hosting.

Almost all spammers are going to take advantage of free hosting services. They do not want to spend any money they don’t have to. They are not investing in their business. If you are blogging professionally, you should be willing to spend money on a real hosting service for your blog.

3. Free Blog Hosting is inferior to the web hosting that is available to you. There are good hosting services out there where you have more control over your blog. FTP access for one. The ability to alter the htaccess file, permissions, etc. allows you to do more things with your blog.

4. There is no “flagging” when you have your own domain name and hosting. On blogger.com, anyone can flag your blog as spam. Anyone, including your competitors can do this. It can be just their opinion. Some people believe that any blog with any commercial purpose at all is not a legitimate blog. They will flag you because they believe they know what you should be doing on your blog.

When you get flagged, blogger.com can shut down your blog and lock you out until they have a chance to review your blog to see if it is spam. It is not innocent until proven guilty. They lock you out and you have to respond to them to ask for a review so you can get back to blogging. If it has not happened to you, it does not mean it won’t. It does happen to legitimate bloggers. Go to google groups about blogger and see all the people posting about being locked out of their blog.

At wordpress.com you can be shut down if they think your blog is too commercial. They will tell you, your blog is not a “legitimate” blog. So the admin people at wordpress.com have decided what is or is not a “legitimate” blog. If you do not conform to their idea of a “legitimate” blog, then they can shut you down. Again, on free hosting, you have absolutely no control.

Now enough about why free hosts for your blog is a bad idea. What about those of you who want to pay for your own webhosting? How do you choose the right hosting service for your blog?

Of course every business, including those whose business is blogging, has a budget they have to work with. But finding the cheapest hosting for your blog is not the answer. Hosting is a very important decision.

Hosting can even affect your seo. If your blog loads too slow, this does have an affect on how well you do in the search engines and on your visitors. Those of you who have been blogging a long time also need a lot of room for all those old posts and images you have used in the past.

Don’t be cheap when choosing a host for your blog. Every business has to have some investment to be really successful. Choose the best host for your blog and consider it part of doing business on the web.

The ultimate goal is to have your own dedicated server where you choose all the options you want your hosting to have. This can cost you as little as $200 per month and as much as $500 per month, depending on the level of hosting and service you want.

If you own or manage a lot of blogs, you definitely should be on dedicated hosting. You can assign seperate IP addresses for each blog and with some you can even choose to have a different c class for each blog you own. That means when you link one blog to another, the links will have more value.

If your busget will not allow you to go with dedicated hosting, you still need to make sure your host has certian features. And do not think because you recognize the name of the company that it is automatically better than other hosting services. GoDaddy is huge, but they are not a hosting service I would use for any blogs.

1. Shared hosting plans, especially from companies that host thousands of websites, sometimes means your blog is never truly in one place. It is served up to viewers from whatever machine has the most available bandwidth at the time.

I’m not techie enough to explain it fully, but suffice it to say, some shared hosting plans that move you around from server to server depending on their current load are not the best option. Some smaller hosting companies are better options simply because they don’t need to move you around. They don’t have the same bandwidth issues.

2. Customer Service: There are level 1, 2, and 3 techs at many hosting companies. Level 1 techs are the guys that answer the phone and when you tell them your problem, they type it into their computer and it gives them a pat response that was already written for them to say. An dmost of the time thye just say, it must be a problem on something you did because everything is fine with our hosting.

When they have no pat response, they send you to a level 2 guy that knows how to make some changes on your server and that person tries to resolve the problem. If he can’t and you are being too difficult, like making them do actual work instead of playing halo 3, they send you to a level 3 tech.

Level 3 techs are supposed to be able to do anything to the server that needs to be done. The problem is that it takes you an hour on the phone to get to one because you have to go through all the people that don’t know how to fix your problem before you get to this person.

There are some hosts that actually allow you to choose whether you have a level, 1, 2, or 3 problem and you get right to the person you need to deal with. They are rare with most hosting plans, but more readily available with dedicated hosting.

3. Windows Hosting: If you want your hosting to be worse than your operating system, you can always go with windows servers. Everytime you hire a coder to do anything, it will cost you more money. This is not an option for blog hosting in my honest opinion.

4. Databases: One question you need to ask your hosting company is how many mySQL databases can I have? You need one everytime you set up a new blog so make sure you have the capability of doing so, even on subdomains if you want to at some point.

5. Bandwidth: This is where they get you. First of all there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. If you are checking out a hosting company and it says unlimited bandwidth, they are lying to you. Go check out another hosting service.

A blog should not have any bandwidth issues unless you are getting 100,000 uniques per day. Make sure you check what happens if you go over your bandwidth allotment though. Do they shut down your blog with a page that says exceeded bandwidth or do they charge you an exhorbitant fee for the overage? You need to know this. The more bandwidth they offer, the better, but again, there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth.

6. Storage Space: Web hosting companies love to tell you about all the storage space they will give you while they give you very little bandwidth. bandwidth is much more important. You really do not need near as much storage space as most of them offer to you unless you run a photo or music downlaod type blog. So don’t be too impressed by storage space. They sell way more storage space than they have because they know that rarely will anyone actually use all of their storage space anyway.

The bottom line is do not be cheap when choosing a hosting service for your blog. Choose the host that provides everything you need and one that provides good service.

Part 3 of Are You A Cheapskate will be about advertising and paid inclusion.

When blogging first started, it was mostly personal diaries and real weblogs that just kept people updated on things that were going on with a particular topic like the development of software.

Then the opinion blogs came right after that along with the bloggers who became citizen journalists like the Drudge Report.

Now companies have discovered how valuable blogs are as a way to communicate with employees, investors, current customers, and potential customers.

We know all those reasons to own a blog, but something that is not talked about much is how blogs can be used as an SEO tool.

Besides all of the other reasons to own a blog, here are some of the SEO reasons having a blog benefits you.

1. A blog in a folder within your website gives you the opportunity to add fresh new content to your website daily, bringing the search engines back to crawl your website more often and increasing your search engine saturation.

2. A blog on a separate domain name and c class IP block can help increase link popularity for your website by linking to different pages within your website from different blog posts.

3. The best reason to own a blog is that a blog can make you more sales. Every time you post to your blog, you have the chance to sell something. Either by including an affiliate link, using ppc, linking to your products pages, and by directly pitching your products and services to customers.

I may look at things differently than some of you, but from a commercial standpoint, every web page you build is an ad. Not your home on the web. Not your store on the web. Not your address on the web. Every page is simply an ad.

If you think about it, the Internet is the newest advertising medium. When radio came along people were slow to accept it as an advertising tool. When tv came along, advertisers were slow to catch on to that too. Compnies were also slow to catch on to the Internet as an advertising medium.

But even those who do know about Internet advertising, think only of buying links and banners on websites and using google adwords or other ppc programs as the forms of advertising that are available on the Internet.

Most do not really realize that the real ad is the webpage you are building. With organic SEO, you are distributing that ad to more people through the search engines. When you also buy ads or participate in ppc, you are really just paying to distribute your webpage ad to more people.

If that is the case, and each blog post you make becomes a webpage of its own, then every time you make a blog post you are creating an ad.

Now, before you protest, I said this applies to people who use the Internet commercially. People who are selling products and services. If you are a commercial entity, you need to be thinking of every page you build as an ad.

Now, that does not mean you cannot still be helpful and provide useful infomration to people for free. You do not have to build nothing but squeeze pages and landing pages that use a lot of hype and a strong, pushy sales pitch.

Subtly advertising your products and services in the sidebar and at the bottom of each post, while providing helpful information is one of the best sales methods there are. You are providing value to your readers for free. They will want to do business with you as a result.

So, when I say every blog post is a sales page, that does not mean you should write your blog as if you are a used car salesman. Just remember to structure your blog and the posts you make to give you a chance to also sell product. Those pages are found by searchers and you could be making sales.

For those who were beginning to think that the lights were out and no one was home at the ODP, it turns out at least a lone blogger still lives there and has started the DMOZ Blog.

I have to see how long that lasts. So many people are disatisfied with DMOZ that the blog comments are going to be really rough. I hope they chose a blogger with a very thick skin!

Here is what they had to say about the rumors of their death.

Some people don’t really think of what they write into their blog as blog content. Most people who blog do it because they enjoy it. They write about their topic naturally and try to engage their readers. They do not worry so much about optimizing their blog posts for keywords.

This is perfectly okay. It all depends on what you are blogging for. If it is your personal blog of random thoughts and ideas, maybe you do not care about how well your blog ranks in the search engines.

But if you blog to make money, you are concerned about ranking well and this post is about optimizing your blog posts for the search engines.

I still dare anyone to prove to me that they know the exact percentage of text on a webpage or in a blog post that should be keywords. I don’t believe anyone other than a few google insiders could know that. They work for google and aren’t about to tell us.

Your first objective is to write content into your blog post that engages and interests your readers. Optimizing the content on your blog comes second to this. Getting a lot of people to visit your blog does no good if your blog content is obviously written more for the search spiders than for your readers.

The method I like to use is to first write my blog post for my readers. Then go back over it to try to catch all the misspelled words, reword what doesn’t sound good when I reread it, and to see if there are places I can insert my keywords without bordering on spam.

By doing this, the blog post is more natural. You will naturally use your keywords and keywords related to your topic by posting about your topic. If you just write each post with a key phrase in mind for that post, you will find ways to use it without going overboard with it.

Another thing on blog content. You can optimize each blog post for just one key phrase. Each blog post becomes a page. So each time you blog, you are creating one page that is optimized for that one key phrase. The next day, target a different key phrase, and so on and so on.

You will soon find you are optimizing your blog content while still remaining interesting to your readers. It becomes second nature.

The bottom line is that of course your readers come before seo, but you do not have to sacrifice quality blog content your readers will like in order to optimize your blog content.