Alexa Rank­ing: It Adds to Your Blog Value

April 27th, 2010 by Ashutosh Vajpeyi View Comments »

Alexa rank was devel­oped by Ama​zon​.com. It mea­sures the traf­fic to a site for the last three months and one month simultaneously.

The assign­ing of a par­tic­u­lar Alexa rank to a web­site or a blog is based on the num­ber of surfers(visitors) to your web­site. The surfers to the web­site must have the Alexa tool­bar installed on their browsers oth­er­wise they will not be counted. The Alexa rank counts the num­ber of vis­i­tors and page views for all the web­sites on a daily basis.

This spe­cific vis­i­tor count­ing also limit the actual mea­sure­ment of pop­u­lar­ity of a par­tic­u­lar web­site or blog. Vis­i­tors not hav­ing installed Alexa tool­bar will not add to the rank­ing and there­fore the over­all rank­ing results will not reflect a true picture.

Most of the time, the Alexa rank­ing reflects the rank­ing of the site in var­i­ous pop­u­lar search engines. The higher the Alexa rank­ing, the higher the site will rank on the search engines. Nor­mally, web­sites that receive a lot of traf­fic have high Alexa rank­ing because they have a lot of back­links. If you fre­quently update your site, your Alexa rank­ing will also increase.

To increase your Alexa rank­ing, you must increase the amount of traf­fic to your site. One way to increase the amount of traf­fic is through link build­ing. In addi­tion, you can write SEO opti­mized con­tent and update your site on a reg­u­lar basis.

Web­sites that are fre­quently updated are often vis­ited by the search engine spi­ders. When­ever you cre­ate a new post, the search engine will crawl your site to pick up the fresh con­tent. Some­times, it will also rank the newly cre­ated page on top of the search result.

Against all odds the Alexa rank­ings are highly regarded among the web­mas­ters and blog­gers alike. A high Alexa rank­ing will make a web­site or a blog rep­utable in the mar­ket­place and such a site will fetch a hand­some price certainly.

If your site or blog ranks below one lakh(100,000) on Alexa then your have made it. Your blog will gain expo­nen­tial growth every day, believe it!

Review http://proficientblogging.com/ on alexa.com

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Posted in Blog Traffic, Blogging, Blogging Basics, Blogging Stategies, Blogs, SEO Tips, Search Engine Optimization, blogging tips

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How to Get Your Blog Indexed

April 24th, 2010 by Ashutosh Vajpeyi View Comments »

If you have cre­ated your blog recently and wish more have vis­i­tors, you must get it indexed in the search engines.

If it is not indexed, it will not appear in the search result.

You may have shared your blog link with other sites and blogs but if you do not get it indexed on the search engine it will cause you to lose a large por­tion of traf­fic. The sitemap can help the search engine to crawl your site more easily.

You can cre­ate a sitemap for your blog by using online sitemap gen­er­a­tor. There are umpteen of such free online sitemap gen­er­a­tors that will gen­er­ate up to 500 pages.

Once you have gen­er­ated the sitemap, you must sub­mit it to Google. To sub­mit your sitemap to Google, you must first sign up an account with them. After reg­is­ter­ing for an account, you can sub­mit the sitemap through the Google web­mas­ter tool. This is not a com­plex process and any­one can get along with it com­fort­ably. “Once your Sitemap is cre­ated, you can sub­mit the URL of the Sitemap file in Google Web­mas­ter Tools or through your robots.txt file”, accord­ing to the Google Web­mas­ter Cen­tral Blog.

In addi­tion to cre­at­ing and sub­mit­ting a sitemap for your blog you should also use social book­mark­ing as an effec­tive tool to get your blog indexed.

Social book­mark­ing site that receives a large amount of traf­fic every day will help you get your blog indexed quickly sim­ply because of its pop­u­lar­ity among the masses and search engines crawl such sites more frequently.

One of such pop­u­lar social book­mark­ing site which you may sub­mit your blog to is Digg. If you sub­mit your site to Digg, it will prob­a­bly get indexed within 1 – 3 days. There are sev­eral other such pop­u­lar social book­mark­ing sites where you can sub­mit your blog.

When social book­mark­ing you blog, make sure you don’t sub­mit too many pages in one day. If you sub­mit too many pages, you will be get­ting too many back­links too fast. When the search engine finds out about this, it will not get indexed your blog but put it into sand­box effect. It will only delay the index­ing of your blog until a few months later. “Search engines index blogs really well, and you have a large num­ber of advan­tages with them”, says Seoblog​.wmhaven​.com

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Posted in Blog Traffic, Blogging, Blogging Basics, SEO Basics, SEO Tips, Social Bookmarking, Wordpress Blogging, blogging tips, social media

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Busi­ness Blog Optimization(BBO) Helps Grow Online Business

April 19th, 2010 by Ashutosh Vajpeyi View Comments »

Busi­ness blog­ging is all about estab­lish­ing a direct line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the cus­tomers through the inter­net and web­sites. Busi­ness blog­ging is con­sid­ered as one of the most effec­tive and pow­er­ful tool to strengthen your web mar­ket­ing port­fo­lio.

Across the bor­ders com­pe­ti­tion among com­pa­nies is get­ting more fierce and sharp each day and this poses great many chal­lenges to the small and medium busi­ness (SMB) that keep try­ing to make a big impact on the web through search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) of their websites.

Cre­ation of a busi­ness blog and attach­ing it to the main busi­ness web­site is one of the potent SEO tech­niques avail­able in the armory of opti­miz­ers. It is in fact an essen­tial com­po­nent of organic SEO mar­ket­ing cam­paign of a website.

“Just imag­ine that your near­est busi­ness com­peti­tor has a blog page that is updated reg­u­larly, while you have none. You stand to lose to your com­peti­tor in terms of search rank­ings. Your chance of mak­ing it to the first page of search results is really bleak, while your com­peti­tor has a fair chance”, accord­ing to Élite SEO Marketing.

In addi­tion to all other rel­e­vant aspects of search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), for search engines, “con­tent is the king”.

Effec­tive, rel­e­vant, and qual­ity con­tent if is updated reg­u­larly, prefer­ably daily, will sure push up the search rank of a web­site and thereby attract more and more poten­tial cus­tomers. A busi­ness strat­egy woven around an effec­tive busi­ness blog would help in grow­ing the num­ber of vis­i­tors almost exponentially.

In due course of time, your site becomes more trace­able by the com­plex algo­rithms of search engines. The search engine algo­rithms gov­ern­ing pop­u­lar and dom­i­nant search engines like Google and Yahoo are extremely com­plex to under­stand and deci­pher. A com­mon inter­net user or a blog­ger would per­haps never be able to fathom the tip of this ice­berg even.

These search engine algo­rithms are main­tained as high­est secret as well, but it has been estab­lished that qual­ity con­tent plays a very big role in deter­min­ing the search rank­ings. Qual­ity score, one of the deter­mi­nants of higher search ranks, is depen­dent on rel­e­vance and quan­tity of con­tent in the site.

Becom­ing suc­cess­ful and pro­fi­cient blog­ger or attain­ing suc­cess in your busi­ness with a busi­ness blog you ought to have more pages of con­tent in your web­site than your com­peti­tors’ and the con­tent should be highly rel­e­vant to your busi­ness line.

It is always bet­ter to have a search engine opti­miza­tion strat­egy in hand well in advance. It is all the good if you can write qual­ity con­tent and refur­bish it peri­od­i­cally in your busi­ness blog but in case you find your­self at a cross­road with cre­at­ing qual­ity con­tent then you must opt for hir­ing an expe­ri­enced and cre­ative con­tent writer instead.

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Posted in Blog Marketing, Blogging, Blogging Stategies, Business Blogging, SEO Basics, SEO Tips, Search Engine Optimization, blogging tips

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Women Who Blog are the Most Actively Engaged Social Media Participants

April 16th, 2010 by Ashutosh Vajpeyi View Comments »

Women are Turn­ing in Even Greater Num­bers to Blogs (55%), and Social Net­works (75%) as Pri­mary Sources of Com­mu­nity Inter­ac­tion, Enter­tain­ment and Information

Women are nearly twice as likely to use blogs than social net­work­ing sites as a source of infor­ma­tion (64%), advice and rec­om­men­da­tions (43%) and opinion-​sharing (55%), while they are 50 per­cent more likely to turn to social net­work­ing sites as a means of keep­ing in touch with friends and fam­ily (75%), BlogHer announced today. The 2009 Women in Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVil­lage and Com­pass Part­ners, which will be released today, found that while women who use social media plat­forms share a strong desire to con­nect and to enter­tain them­selves, there are also ways in which the moti­va­tions for using var­i­ous social media plat­forms dif­fer. Since the release of last year’s Bench­mark Study of Women and Social Media, women are turn­ing in even greater num­bers to blogs (55%), social net­works (75%) and online sta­tus updat­ing (20%) as pri­mary sources of com­mu­nity inter­ac­tion, enter­tain­ment and infor­ma­tion. Because they are regarded as trusted sources of infor­ma­tion, blogs now wield con­sid­er­able influ­ence on con­sumers’ pur­chas­ing habits – 45 per­cent of sur­vey respon­dents stated that they decided to pur­chase an item after read­ing about it on a blog.

BlogHer and iVil­lage, who together form the largest inter­ac­tive com­mu­nity of women online, con­ducted the research in part­ner­ship with Com­pass Part­ners to gather insights on the ways women in the United States use social media in their every­day lives. The study reviews and com­pares data from two user sam­ple sets – a gen­eral pop­u­la­tion sam­ple of more than 2,000 U.S. women aged 18 – 77 years against a BlogHer Net­work sam­ple of more than 1,000 women.

“Social media con­tin­ues to be a grow­ing phe­nom­e­non, and blog­gers, in par­tic­u­lar, rep­re­sent a highly engaged and influ­en­tial seg­ment of social media users for brand mar­keters look­ing to con­nect to con­sumers online.” said Susan Wright, Pres­i­dent of Com­pass Part­ners LLC. “Blog­gers have a broad reach in the social media pop­u­la­tion and the sur­vey demon­strates that women who blog are the most actively engaged social media par­tic­i­pants — con­stantly seek­ing out new ideas and ways to share their opin­ions about those ideas.”

This study mea­sured the habits and atti­tudes of women who par­tic­i­pate in any social media activ­ity weekly or more often with approx­i­mately half par­tic­i­pat­ing daily. Of the 42 mil­lion women engaged in social media weekly, 55 per­cent of women par­tic­i­pate in some form of blog­ging activ­ity; 75 per­cent par­tic­i­pate in social net­works such as Face­book or MySpace and 20 per­cent use Twit­ter. As a result of this increased activ­ity, the 2009 study found that women online are now more than ever before spend­ing less time engag­ing in tra­di­tional media activ­i­ties like watch­ing TV (30%), lis­ten­ing to the radio (31%), and read­ing mag­a­zines (36%) or the news­pa­per (39%).

“The scale of social media usage among U.S. women con­tin­ues to grow, and blogs remain the go-​to resource for those who want to gather infor­ma­tion, share ideas and get reli­able advice,” said Elisa Cama­hort Page, BlogHer co-​founder and COO. “At a time when the econ­omy is top of mind for more than 70 per­cent of these active social media par­tic­i­pants, women who blog are turn­ing to online resources, includ­ing blogs, to help them make their day to day pur­chas­ing deci­sions.” » Read more: Women Who Blog are the Most Actively Engaged Social Media Participants

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Posted in Blogging, Blogging Trends, Blogs, News, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, social media

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Sur­prise Blog Mar­ket­ing: Lit­tle Things Make a Huge Difference

April 15th, 2010 by Ashutosh Vajpeyi View Comments »

Busi­ness with Blog­ging and Sur­prise Strate­gies are Always Beneficial

Blogs by and large all look alike as far as the struc­ture is con­cerned and reg­u­lar vis­i­tors and blog read­ers find noth­ing new except the design and con­tent of a blog. Con­tent is the most impor­tant dis­tin­guish­ing fea­ture of a blog dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing it from other com­pet­i­tive blogs.

An ele­ment of sur­prise may hit anyone’s eyes and prompt say­ing “Wow, I never expected this! “. This would help the blog­ger cut­ting through the clut­ter and make peo­ple gen­er­ate “word of mouth” and say “You need to see this, it is incred­i­ble indeed”.

Among the big shifts that you can select for your blog would be switch­ing over the blog mar­ket­ing from a “riding-​shotgun” approach to a well planned strate­gi­cally designed sur­prise ori­ented campaign.

Look at the ‘sur­prise twist’ offered by Dis­ney with its “The Year of a Mil­lion Dreams”. This bril­liant twist says,” imag­ine walk­ing through one of the ‘Walt Dis­ney Theme Parks’ when a cast mem­ber taps you on the shoul­der to offer you a dream come true. Right now, over a mil­lion extra-​special dreams, some thought impos­si­ble, are being ran­domly awarded to peo­ple just like you”.

Sur­prise blog mar­ket­ing also fol­lows golden oldie “give­away” prin­ci­ple. We are observ­ing some of the mar­keters shift­ing their atten­tion to this thumb rule.

Giv­ing away of eBooks is one such help­ful tool that def­i­nitely attracts peo­ple. One more inno­v­a­tive con­cept has slipped in these days. Some of the web­sites and blog mar­keters have started giv­ing away “con­cept papers” and “white papers” to their view­ers and cus­tomers for no cost. These kinds of give­aways are actu­ally knowl­edge enhancers and many peo­ple love to have them.

A sim­ple sur­prise ges­ture kicks away the annoy­ance of a viewer very often. It helps him for­get­ting the waste­ful clicks. An ele­ment of sur­prise will always keep a blog alive and fresh as it would attract many new and come back vis­i­tors to have a feel of the surprise.

Blog mar­ket­ing has full poten­tial if mixed with sur­prises. It’s the key to great enter­tain­ment. Sur­prise fuels great mar­ket­ing, cre­ates inno­v­a­tive oppor­tu­ni­ties and gen­er­ates revenue.

Blogs nor­mally thrive on blog posts and adver­tise­ments. There exists a large gap in cre­ative con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion and mar­ket­ing of a blog. This large gap can cre­ate an oppor­tu­nity with creativity.

Mon­tréal entre­pre­neur Andy Null­man, an author­ity on sur­prise mar­ket­ing says,” small busi­nesses have a great chance to make a dif­fer­ence in their mar­ket­place by using the power of sur­prise to delight and astound their customers”.

Blog mar­keters should remem­ber the golden guid­ing prin­ci­ple, “lit­tle things make a huge dif­fer­ence”. In this world where peo­ple tell their friends and believe what their own friends tell them. It is the “word of mouth” that dri­ves sales up to great extent and “not ads for the umpteenth sur­prise sale that is not a sur­prise at all”, accord­ing to Rogers Wire­lesses’ ini­tia­tive “Share the Joy”.

Blog mar­keters must know how to start with sur­prise mar­ket­ing. Think what you did last month and try explor­ing new ideas in order to see if you can do some­thing dif­fer­ent. “Ask you, what we could do that we never dared to do?” says Andy Null­man. He fur­ther advises, “Mar­ket­ing is about a rela­tion­ship, and like all rela­tion­ships, you have to keep it fresh”.

Sur­prise blog mar­ket­ing is not a mas­sive invest­ment pro­posal. Its cost effec­tive­ness is also a sur­pris­ing fact.

Blog mar­keters are always lever­aged with tac­tics. If one tac­tic does not click, try another one. Cre­ate one more buzz .After all blog mar­keters are their own mas­ters. They can opt for more risks and do not require per­mis­sions for that.

Sur­prise mar­ket­ing adds new tools to the exist­ing strate­gies with low cost, high speed, flex­i­bil­ity and other components.

Suc­cess depends much on the use of maneu­ver, sur­prise, and speed to find an oppor­tu­nity. It is more like the fighter pilots who under­stand the impor­tance of “get­ting inside” in a dog­fight by turn­ing and maneu­ver­ing quicker than the enemy to fix their guns on the enemy plane well before it comes to know the inten­tions. That means knock­ing with fast and unpre­dictable tac­tics giv­ing out surprises.

Busi­ness with blog­ging is thus no less than the fighter’s war.

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Posted in Blog Marketing, Blogging, Blogging Stategies, Business Blogging, blogging tips

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Sched­uled Back­ups Help Secure Your Blog

April 14th, 2010 by Ashutosh Vajpeyi View Comments »

Backup Min­i­mizes the Losses and Serve as the First Line of Defence

You must have read or heard that “no web­site can ever be made 100% secure”. No mat­ter how well the site is designed and made secure with all pos­si­ble secu­rity mea­sures in place, it takes only the time and deter­mi­na­tion for an expert hacker to cre­ate a hole in to it. 

So what you should do with your word­press blog to ensure its pro­longed safety and secu­rity from such mishappenings?

Backup is the best mea­sure to min­i­mize the losses. Back­ups will cer­tainly serve you as the first line of defence. With pre-​scheduled func­tional back­ups you can eas­ily erase every­thing in your server and you would be back online in a mat­ter of hours.

I have my own expe­ri­ence of per­ish­ing by not keep­ing daily backup of this site itself. Although it was not a theft or hack­ing case but the result was same and obvi­ous. I was in the mid­dle of pub­lish­ing a blog post and all of sud­den every­thing gone off. The con­nec­tion to the “wp-​admin” page was lost and every­thing on my site was sim­ply washed away in a flash.

For three days I kept strug­gling with every pos­si­ble solu­tion but noth­ing helped. I attempted Google search and other means a lot and tried every solu­tion sug­gested by expe­ri­enced and pro­fi­cient blog­gers and web­mas­ters but in vain.

I even could not under­stand what exactly had hap­pened and where and how things went wrong. All my posts on this blog were lost (my hard work of course). In fact the con­nec­tion (link) to my blog was bro­ken and I even could not open the word­press admin page. The site was sim­ply not avail­able on the inter­net. It was a big blow indeed!

I checked with the “cpanel con­fig­u­ra­tion”. Sur­pris­ingly every­thing was per­fectly func­tion­ing but there was no con­tent avail­able. All my posts that I wrote with a lot of research and sin­cer­ity were gone for­ever sim­ply because I for­got to keep a backup of every­thing. How fool­ish of me!

A week later the news broke out and I came to know that it was actu­ally some unsched­uled activ­ity at some ‘word­press dat­a­cen­ter’ and because of this activ­ity mil­lions of word­press blogs were at great loss and I was among those beneficiaries!

I was left with no choice but to do it from scratch. It took whole lot efforts to rein­stall the word­press for pro​fi​cient​blog​ging​.info all over again. But in the end this inci­dence taught me a good les­son that while work­ing online backup is the most cru­cial ele­ment to ensure in advance, “else a theft or fire could take both your site and the backup”, says Daniel Scocco from ‘Daily Blog Tips’.

Word­Press blog­ging plat­form is so enriched with fea­tures that it offers backup facil­i­ties to the blogger’s advan­tage. You can eas­ily find a suit­able word­press plug-​in for backup the word­press blog. Recent entry of the ‘Vault­press” plug-​in is a great addi­tion to the backup ser­vices. This ver­sa­tile plug-​in gives you much flex­i­bil­ity with your blog’s backup set­tings and schedules.

“Vault­Press is the only pro­tec­tion and backup ser­vice built on the Automat­tic grid that reli­ably serves over 10 mil­lion Word​Press​.com blogs and 250 mil­lion monthly vis­i­tors”, accord­ing to Vaultpress.

You can sched­ule a backup of your word­press blog as per your own choice and con­ve­nience. I pre­fer daily backup of all my blogs and ensure to keep the same at two dif­fer­ent loca­tions so that in case one is missed or lost I can always have an easy access to another if some­thing wrong hap­pens to my blogs and sites.

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Posted in Blogging, Blogging Basics, Blogging Stategies, Wordpress Blogging, Wordpress Plug-In, blogging tips, wordpress

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Search Engine Mar­ket­ing Indus­try Set to Boom

April 13th, 2010 by Ashutosh Vajpeyi View Comments »

SEMPO Report Pre­dicts Biggest Oppor­tu­ni­ties for Search Marketers

The North Amer­i­can search engine mar­ket­ing indus­try is expected to grow by 14% from $14.6 bil­lion in 2009 to $16.6 bil­lion by the end of 2010.

This pre­dic­tion is based on the results of the sixth annual State of Search Engine Mar­ket­ing Report recently released by “The Search Engine Mar­ket­ing Pro­fes­sional Orga­ni­za­tion (SEMPO)”. The global online sur­vey included almost 1500 client-​side mar­keters and agen­cies who participated.

Some of the major trend-​setting pre­dic­tions and find­ings of the SEMPO report include;

  1. The pro­jected growth in the social media mar­ket­ing bud­gets, although still mod­est com­pared to search engine opti­miza­tion and paid search, rep­re­sents the biggest oppor­tu­nity for search mar­keters in near future.
  2. Almost 50% of the com­pa­nies pre­fer real­lo­cat­ing bud­gets to search engine mar­ket­ing from print adver­tis­ing. Nearly 36% of the com­pa­nies were reported to be shift­ing money away from direct mail, and almost 25% are mov­ing bud­gets from con­fer­ences and exhi­bi­tions (24%) and web dis­play adver­tis­ing.
  3. The research high­lights that Google lit­er­ally rules the search engine with 97% of com­pa­nies pay­ing to adver­tise on Google AdWords. Nearly 70% of com­pa­nies chose to pay to adver­tise on the Google search net­work while 56% use the Google con­tent net­work (key­word targeted).
  4. More than half of adver­tis­ers (56%) and agen­cies (62%) opine that Google key­words have become more expen­sive com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year. Mean­while, only around a third of adver­tis­ers noted an increase in Yahoo (32%) and Bing (29%) key­word costs.
  5. Analy­sis of the range of trends and mar­ket­place devel­op­ments led to the con­clu­sion that “per­son­al­iza­tion of search results is hav­ing an impact”. 31% of the com­pa­nies find it “highly sig­nif­i­cant,” and 44% say it is “sig­nif­i­cant.” Agency respon­dents felt the “rise of local search” was the most sig­nif­i­cant emerg­ing trend with 38% say­ing this was “highly sig­nif­i­cant” with 47% label­ing it as “significant.”

The report also revealed that mea­sure­ment of ‘the return on invest­ment (ROI)’ is the biggest chal­lenge fac­ing mar­keters this year in all three key search tac­tics cov­ered in the sur­vey — search engine opti­miza­tion, paid search, and social media mar­ket­ing.

“While mea­sur­ing ROI seems to be an obvi­ous reflec­tion of today’s eco­nomic envi­ron­ment, it is impor­tant to note as it will likely con­tinue to drive bud­get deci­sions. This bodes well for the con­tin­ued growth of the search indus­try as evi­denced by the pro­jected increased invest­ment in search tac­tics”, says Marc Engels­man of SEMPO Research Committee.

Linus Gre­go­ri­adis, Econ­sul­tancy research direc­tor added, “While spend­ing is still mod­est, many do look for­ward to increas­ing invest­ment in social media efforts this year.”

The report is based on an online sur­vey, which took place in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary 2010. SEMPO and Econ­sul­tancy pro­moted the survey.

1,471 respon­dents took part in the sur­vey, includ­ing 527 adver­tis­ers and 944 supply-​side respon­dents car­ry­ing out search engine mar­ket­ing on behalf of clients (includ­ing agen­cies or con­sul­tants).

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Posted in Blogging, Blogging Stategies, Business Blogging, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Social Media Marketing, social media

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