Pages get treated differently to posts in most blog software platforms. In WordPress, you can constantly modify your pages and WordPress doesn’t react, unlike a post which gets pinged every time you make a change (unless you install plugins to prevent that).

A well written page can be a center piece for your blog. It could contain helpful information, a ‘how to’ piece or perhaps information such as a corporate or product history. Generally speaking, posts are fairly short at around 500 words. A page can be as long as you like, although there is a good argument to break a long piece into two or more sub pages.

The page content could be a collation of several posts, particularly if you have written a series. Rewrite the series into one long page and publish it separately. Link from the series posts to static page. As you update the page, you can write a short post advising every one of the changes. This brings this page back to everyone’s attention again.

From an SEO perspective, static pages make a lot of sense for information that could be of use to readers instead of simply using a post.

Hosted by Brick Marketing president and SEO expert Nick Stamoulis he will go over all topics such as the ABC’s of SEO and local internet marketing to help boost local awareness of your product or service and help you drive visitors to your blog. Nick Stamoulis brings 12+ years of online marketing experience to this event only offering good quality information that is guaranteed to help improve your company’s visibility. Nick is the editor and publisher of 7 relevant website marketing blogs and is an active member in groups such as SEMPO and the American Marketing Association. Nick Stamoulis also specializes in one-on-one website consulting for anybody looking to work directly with Nick Stamoulis.

The ABC’s of SEO is designed to teach SEO techniques to those who are looking to increase sales, leads and visitors through all the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN. This is a judgment free event for all those beginners that might be timid to attend an event such as this. This Boston internet marketing event is constructed for those who don’t know where to turn for help and advice. At this event all questions are good questions. Not everybody has the ability to learn the popular SEO techniques that many are using so now is the time to learn as much as you can from an expert in the field. This event will teach you not only the basics but also some advanced programs such as social marketing website building and newsletter marketing. This event is a one stop shop to hit all angles of your online business. This program will teach you how to successfully tackle up to date online marketing techniques to further your knowledge and help grow your online business the right way.

Don’t wait until the last minute, early bird registrations going through September 12th. Save $25 per registration by doing it now. For more information on how to register please visit the website today and pre-register for your space.

Although titled Adsense Manager, this plugin does more than just manage your Adsense ads. It now also supports  AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Commission Junction, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and WidgetBucks.

Automatic Ad Code Importer for all supported networks. Widgets & Sidebar Modules compatible (as used in the popular K2 theme). Automatic limiting of Ads to meet network T&Cs (Google 3 units/page)

This plugin generates the code automatically and allows the ad units to be placed using widgets. As it now supports so many different advertising streams, it possibly one of the best Adsense Ad managers around. It is easy to install and fairly easy to use. You really do need to read the instructions carefully however.

If you have ad units on your site then this blog plugin should make life a lot easier. The easier it is to manage your ad the easier it will be to increase your blogging income.

Comments can be one of the best sources for content on your blog. If a reader leaves a comment that you feel is particularly useful to your reader and could be expanded upon, then use it.

Take that comment and use it to generate blog content by expanding, perhaps arguing for or against, that content. Where necessary, research the response so that you can supply accurate information. When writing the content, be sure to acknowledge the commentator and look for and provide a relevant link to one of their related pages.

The person who left the comment will, of course, feel honored that you have taken the time to respond. Not only have you responded, you have acknowledged them and provided a link - in effect, you have advertised their site for them.

Other reader will note this. If you do it on a regular basis, others will start to leave meaningful comments in an attempt to get you to use their comment and link to their site. This can provide an endless supply of potentially good blog content, all sitting in your comments fields waiting to be used.

As you start to link to these readers, they will start to link back to you. The end result is that your search rankings may well start to rise and you will become a respected blogger. You may even end up with a reputation for being an authority in your field.

One argument I hear is that this traffic is going to the blog, not to the website and it is through the website that sales are made. This can actually be an error in thinking. Blogs can actually make the sale and the website becomes the portal to complete that sale.

If you can approach blogs as being a part of your sales team and not just an advertising vehicle, your sales will increase and with it your customer loyalty. The interactive nature of blogs helps a website to build relationships with customers and potential customers. If your product or service is of an acceptable standard then you find those customers returning time after time.

Undertaking a good search engine optimization program on a blog is not difficult. Using software such as WordPress, together with plugins desinged to make SEO easier, your blog can start to climb the search rankings fairly quickly. The more pages of good content you provide, the easier it can become. Gaining a ranking does lead to increases in traffic, traffic that is free.

Do blogs help to deliver more traffic to your website? Blogs will only deliver more traffic to your website if your content draws them to it. Having good content with a professional page, a suitable placed call to action and a product/service that is related to your blogs pages will increase your traffic.

What should be looked at is not the increase in traffic. It is the increase in sales that is the most important metric. The extra traffic to your website may only increase marginally compared to the amount of traffic your blog receives. However, that traffic going to your website is often there to close the deal. You can achieve conversions well over 50% from blog traffic. Compare this to the 5-10% conversion from direct search traffic to your website, and your blog is paying for itself very quickly.

Make your blog a part of your sales team and let it do the selling for you - after all, your blog is receiving the extra traffic - make it count.

There is a lot of flexibility when it comes to designing your ad. You can have the usual text only, image only or text/image ad units. You can apply the ad units to every feed, every 2nd, 3rd or 4th feed. This can be a good control mechanism if you publish a lot of content and don’t want to flood your readers with ads units, or if you want to share advertising space around several different advertisers.

A further aid to managing the flow of ad units is the size of the post. You can set the ad units to appear in feeds that are greater than some predetermined word counts. As the publisher you can select top or bottom placement of the ad units and predefine a color scheme, or let Google determine the appropriate colors.

The down side is that only Google feeds can be monetized. You can go through the process and move your Feedburner feed to a Google account and then take advantage of the ad units. For new users to Feedburner, you will set up via Google so you will be set to go from the outset.

I am surprised that Google, with all its technical know-how, couldn’t just write the ads in to existing accounts. It one more little control over what users do. Do it their way - or take the highway.

Movable type has long been a blogging and CMS tool and the latest release, 4.2, goes one step further and capable of turning any site into a full social publishing platform. The Movable Type blog claims :

…..combining all of Movable Type’s abilities as a blogging and CMS with social networking features like profiles, ratings, user registration, forums, following, and more.

The platform upgrade to Movable Type 4.2 fulfills the top three requests made by our community — it’s up to 100 times faster for common tasks, features much simpler templates for customizing your site, and includes 100% free and open source TypePad AntiSpam for keeping junk comments off your site.

Movable Type is available as a free download and self install. There is also a Pro edition which includes blogger support (around $99 for the free version). The Pro edition is quite pricey for just under $400.

If you do a product comparison, the free version, whilst lacking support, appears to have broader appeal than the paid version. The free version has unlimited authors and community profiles whilst the paid version is limited to 20 authors and 5000 community profiles. A careful read of the product comparison table seems to indicate the only real benefit to the paid version is the blogger support, and that can be purchased separately anyway.

There are a lot of Movable Type fans around and I am sure they will welcome the latest version. Whether we need any more social outlets is debatable, otherwise the screenshots and the sites I have seen that use it as their blog software look good.

One of the strange things about WordPress is that after very carefully crafting a table you can go straight to publishing. Everything appears to look fine until you find a mistake and need to go back and edit. The moment you load that page into the editor the code goes crazy.

It seem WordPress can publish the code with little problem, the editor has a lot of problems in converting it back when you need to edit that page. There are several work arounds. The first, and most obvious, is to make sure everything is 100% right before publishing. Once published, leave it alone and don’t return to edit it again.

There are plugins that can help. One sets up a table section under the Manage menu. However it does not handle links within the table.

The third option, and in the longer the easiest, is to use MS Word. Create your table using Word and when you are ready to place into the page, use the ‘Paste from Word’ option that can be found under the ‘Advanced Toolbar’ button.

If you do need to re-edit that page and the code corrupts, make the alterations in word and simply delete everything from your WordPress page and re copy and paste. Works a dream every time with no coding and hassles.

By far the easiest solution is to simply write over it all with fresh up-to-date content. Don’t change the title; don’t change the URL - just update the content.

Your old content, whilst rating well, will not provide any of the information your visitors need. Because of this, they are likely to arrive, take one look and hit the back button. The long term effect of this is that may actually harm your ratings over time. If your pages are linked together then any downward pressure one or more pages may flow through to other pages.

When you update the pages, be sure to include a notice at the top or bottom of the page to the effect that is has been updated on (whichever date). This tells people that the information is current and up-to-date. It also helps to make you look more professional.

If you play it smart, you can copy the old content to a new file that can be archived away. Provide a link to this content in case someone comes back looking for it. By rewriting the content you are making use of the all historical value of the original post, at the same time you providing your reader with the most recent information. After all, your content is supposed to be focused on the reader.

If we accept that we are fallible and that we can and do make mistakes, should we go back and correct those mistakes? There are some purists who feel that what has been written should stay, mistakes and all. There are others who are rather pedantic and they will not only correct any mistakes, they will also rewrite sentences for better effect.

Who is right? It’s your content. You can do what you want with it. To be fair to your readers however, you should be big enough to admit your mistakes when making corrections. This can easily be done use the strikethrough feature that most blog software uses (ABC).

If a reader has left a comment pointing out errors, make the alterations using the strikethrough and then leave comment back thanking them for pointing out the error.

When it comes to rewriting the content, I generally draw the line. In the first few hours after publishing I may makes some tweaks, otherwise it stays the same.  If I have had a change of heart, well there’s another topic for a new post at a later date.

Correct mistakes is a personal part blogging.  Your blog content does represent you so glaring spelling mistakes may not be in your own best interests. Using stikethough shows that you are humble enough to correct mistakes - it also shows you go back through your work and check it.

Like most issues, there are those that want only excerpt while others want the full story. From the bloggers point of view, you can be self centered and decide to only send an excerpt with the attitude of ‘come visit my site to read the rest’.

Other bloggers send full feeds to their subscribers providing them with the complete post. My preference generally is to receive the full feed. I don’t have time to visit every site that I have subscribed to.

As a reader, what do you prefer, the full feed or just an excerpt? Or are you like me, longing for the day when I can choose a full feed or excerpt?

Many of the SEO problems associated with WordPress can be fixed. If you have obtained an SEO friendly theme then some of these problems should have been taken care of. SEO problems include:

Sidebar code appears before the content. This is double edged sword. As most pages use the same sidebars, every page will appear the same to the search engines until they reach the content. This is not such a problem if everything is working smoothly. If, however, there is one code glitch in the sidebar, the search engines will not actually get to read the content. No content, no page indexing.

Archive and Category pages showing duplicate content. This can be taken care of with a plugin. The alternative is to simply set each of these pages to display excerpts only. You can also set them to not index the meta tags.

H2 tags used in sidebars. H2 tags generally signify content of importance. Using H1 or H2 tags in the sidebars may send conflicting messages to the search engines spiders. Good effective coding in the CSS code can avoid the overuse of H1 or H2 tags. This can be a problem when comments use H1 or H2 and you have a lot of comments.

Title tags and HTML poorly set up. WordPress, out of the box has no SEO structure when saving pages/posts. You can set the permalinks to create good SEO titles and URL’s using the page title first. There are plugins that can help to create page titles.

With a little care and a little patience you can create an extremely friendly SEO WordPress site.

Don’t use your blog to trash on the competition.

Your blog should be about your business. The moment you start trash talking the opposition you are achieving two negatives.

First, you are promoting - remember some people accept that negative publicity is better than no publicity.

Secondly, you are lowering your own company’s reputation. Leave the verbal trashing of your competition to others. In fact, if someone leaves a negative about your competition in your comments don’t delete and don’t agree. Either ignore the comment or be noble and respond by turning the comment to your benefit. For example, if someone complains of slow delivery from the competition, respond with “I understand your concern, we all face delivery problems at times, however we……….”.

Don’t turn your blog into a catalog

There are times when I visit a blog and it is really nothing more than a compilation of all their catalog. Every post is a product description, price and link to the shopping cart. By all means use your blog to promote your products; however you need to go beyond a simple product description.

Blog about how it could be used, how and when to service or change consumables, perhaps even how to upgrade. Mix these posts with interesting posts that are more general. Your blog should answer questions, not push products.

Don’t talk at or down to your readers

Your tone should be one of discussion or sharing. Talking down to your readers does not encourage a two way communication which is where a blogs real power sits. Use friendly everyday language that avoids the overuse of jargon or industry ’speak’.

Treat your readers as equals. Encourage them to share their experiences while you share yours with them.

Don’t ignore your readers - they are potential customers

Never ignore a reader. If they take the time to comment then leave a response, particularly if they have asked a question. If the response required is a long one, either email it to them if they have left an email address, or provide a short summary with the option of emailing a full response. If you email a response, note it in the comments so others can see that you have answered the question.

You can also send a short email thanking them for taking the time to comment and offering them opportunity to sign up for a newsletter. You will be surprised at how many people take up the offer. You have made them feel special by sending a personal email acknowledging their comments.

These four blogging tips will help you relate yourself, your site and your products to your potential customers. Treat every visitor to your site as if they have just walked into your store - because, in reality, they have!

The Adsense Blog - Inside Adsense - has some good tips for optimizing your images so that Google can provide relevant ads. The most important tip for bloggers to think about is to try and imagine your site with the graphics missing.

You don’t have to imagine it. Turn the images feature off in your browser, and then visit your pages. If you use Firefox then go to Tools/Options/Content and uncheck Automatically Load Images. Now you can see your site as Google sees it when it is trying to provide relevant content.

If you page is fairly blank, you have a problem. Simple tasks such as using ALT tags in the image information will help. Consider adding a small amount of text using keywords close to the image describing the general theme of the image(s).

Once you have a reasonable amount of text that is keyword optimized, Google can proceed to provide ads that are relevant to your content. This may improve your overall click rate and increase your blogging income potential.

The problem is one of spam. If submitting ones own work was accepted then every post ever published would end up on every social bookmarking site. Eventually it would defeat the purpose. At the other end of the scale however is a general leathargy in the promoting of other sites.

I wonder how many times you have read an article and though, that was good. It was informative, well written and I really got a lot out of it. Then moved on. Social bookmarking sites are designed to share well written interesting content. You have just read something that meets those objectives so why is it you don’t share? It’s a general malaise that effects nearly every user. Eventually many bloggers submit their own content out of frustration.

Where you can submit your own content is indirectly. If you write and submit articles to directories, find where the article has been reprinted (with your links) and submit those pages to the social bookmarking sites.

You can also undertake link searches to see who is linking to your pages. If you come across pages that have linked to you (particularly with a quote), submit that page to a social bookmarking site.

By submitting these pages to the social bookmarking sites, you are promoting them to other users. Your pages may not receive the increased traffic, however the site you have submitted will and the link back to your page(s) may increase in value. You will often see an increase in traffic from users following the link to your pages.

Social bookmarking is all about sharing interesting to finds to other users. Anyone who quotes my articles and links to my pages is going to be interesting - at least in my eyes - so I am certainly going to bookmark those pages for others (including the search engines) to find.

If you are submitting purelyfor link value then high ranking blog directories that utilize the ‘dofollow’ are a must. If you are looking for traffic then perhaps using the lower ranked blog directories could offer better value.

With the higher ranked blog directories, you are competing against ten’s of thousands of blogs. In any one day there may be 1000 new submissions. With so much competition your chances of being seen and your link followed are greatly reduced.

The smaller blog directories have fewer blogs listed so your chances of being on the first couple of pages for your category. This increases your visibility and with it the chances of having your link followed.

There is a downside to submitting to smaller directories and that is the substantially smaller flow of traffic. However being seen by a few can be better than being hidden from the masses. If you are selctive with your choice of directories and try to find directories with specific categories related to your site then your hit rate may improve further.

Ideally, you should submit your blog to a variety of different blog directories. Some large with good rankings and some small with low rankings but the opportunity for good exposure.

WordPress is one of the more popular choices. However Drupal, B2Evolution and Moveable Type have all been popular in the world of self hosted blog software packages.

Each package had its own group of keen followers. Most of these packages are open source and there is plenty of encouragement to either improve the basic program or to develop themes, plugins or modules that can add features.

Sometime it can be worth playing with some of these alternatives to just to get a feel for them. If you have a self hosted site with and interface like cPane, you can install blog software programs that come with the cPanel software. B2Eolution and Drupal are popular inclusion along with WordPress.

Blog software doesn’t stop at WordPress and for some niches; there may be better software packages available. Join related forums and check out what other find best suited to the niche.

Sidebars are a good example. Templates and blog designs come with no sidebars, one, two or even three sidebars. Some fancy templates go so far as to divide the sidebars so you may have a top sidebar followed by left and right (funny how the left and right can be all on the left or all on the right) followed by a bottom sidebar.

What appears in your sidebars will appear on the front page and on every other page including archives and static pages. This is not always optimal. Do you want your blogroll appearing on every page, or just the front page? Do you need archives or categories on every page?

There are many reasons for saying no to the above questions, particularly when it comes to SEO and controlling the ‘link juice’. Sometimes you want pages that have very little in the way of outbound links and what links you do have you want control of.

It is possible to change the sidebars for individual pages and for archive pages. The process is a little tedious and one that I will leave for another day. What you need to decide is what information you want displayed in your sidebars on single and archive pages. Wordpress has more power than most people are aware of.  Rethinking your sidebars is just one possible change you could make.

One tactic I have seen used is to turn comments off on certain posts. The reason? They have crafted their post with carefully placed  keywords and they feel that comments will dilute the keyword ratio.

Let’s be clear about one myth about keywords, there is no specific keyword ratio that works better than another. Obviously your keywords do need to appear regularly.  However, to say 10%, or 5% or 7.5% is not accurate. Keywords should appear naturally within the content. Effective blog SEO places keywords in the title, in any headings and then throughout the post.

Will comments dilute this keyword ratio? Probably not. If you feel that comments may dilute your keyword ratio, rather than turning comments off, you can respond to comments using keywords within your response. This can help to maintain your keyword ratio if you insist on using one.

Comments are a valuable component of any blog. It is throught he comment interaction that you can develop relationships with other bloggers. This invariably leads to increases in links,  one of the most important aspects of blog SEO.

Don’t switch off your comments, use them to help your blog SEO program and ultimately boost your rankings.

Leaving comments is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to develop a name for yourself. Comments are your opportunity to voice your opinion about the blog post you read, add something that was not covered in the post, and discuss the post with other readers.

Popularity:
Blog commenting is a great way to make your name recognizable by many other bloggers. As you gain in popularity your website gains as well.

Traffic to your website:
As people come to recognize you they will start to visit your site. This is particularly true if you have written a similar article and referenced it in the comment. Don’t spam by linking without the blog owner’s permission.

More comments on your blog:
As the traffic to your blog increases you may find the comments starting to increase. This will rely very much on the content you write. Obviously if you write posts that are boring you will find that no one wants to comment. Keep it interesting and fresh.

Improve relationship with the blog community:
By commenting on other blogs and writing material that draws comments, your relationship with the blogging community develops. This improved relationship leads to subscriptions to newsletters and further involvement with your site.

Backlinks:
Many blogs incorporate a do follow in the blog comments. This provides a valuable link back to your pages. More importantly, as you gain a reputation that is supported by quality content you will find others either quoting or referring to you in their posts, with links. The more back links you can gather, the better your search rankings will be. This of course leads to more traffic.

The key to commenting on other blogs is to develop a sensible regime. You don’t need to comment on every blog you read. Be selective with your comments. Leave comments that are on topic, help the reader clarify points or perhaps add new information. Quality and relevance are the most important aspects. If it looks at all spammy then your comments will most likely end up in the trash - where they belong.