How to Use Blogs for Search Engine Optimization and Backlink Building

It's no secret that blogging can boost your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website. Blogs promote the exchange of ideas in a format that the Internet users have fully endorsed. When search engine spiders find an active blog, they tend to crawl it more frequently and more often. Incorporating a blog into your website will help you get quality backlinks and improve your credibility.
Many business owners are not aware of what the search engine optimization benefits of blogging are. A recent study conducted on a group of SEO practitioners has shown that over 87 percent of those who have used blogging for SEO have obtained measurable results. Backlinks were cited as the most important SEO benefit from blogging. Starting a blog can also help you establish authority in the marketplace, interact with your customers, and promote your products more effectively.
Most blogging platforms offer uncomplicated URL structure, making it easy for search engines to find and crawl your content. An active blog creates the kinds of signals from other websites that search engine spiders tend to reward in the rankings. A blog that is updated frequently attracts both human visitors and search engines.
The better you write, the more people will link back to your site. In addition, there are many plugins and widgets that make it easy to share your articles and posts, thus encouraging links. You can also use blogging to constantly add fresh, relevant articles to your website. No one can give an exact answer on how often you should blog. Most experts say that whether you update your blog once a day or once a week, it really doesn't matter, just as long as it is relevant and consistent.
Not many webmasters and business owners who start blogs have the patience to create quality content. If you want people to find your blog and click back to your pages, you need to write compelling posts and use relevant keywords. No matter how many SEO techniques you use, there simply is no substitute for creating quality content.
Conduct backlink analysis on competing blogs and take the time to look at articles that already rank well in search results. While the main objective of a blog should be to get your message out, don't forget to do proper research and optimize your content for search engines. Get listed on other people's blogrolls and include your blog URL in profiles on social media sites.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7005198

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Relationship Building Through Social Media

Relationships are at the heart of social media success for your business. Your online strategy must include the concept in some form and you should keep track of how much return on investment those relationships are bringing to your business.
To some people, establishing relationships with others may not be an easy thing to do. It is extremely important to understand, if you are going to get anywhere with increasing your business’ revenue, you need to establish solid, substantial, mutually-beneficial relationships. There are several principles you should follow so you can enrich your business relationships.
Authenticity
As you are probably aware, authenticity will never be overrated. People know when you are being authentic and they know when you are not being authentic. Authenticity is spoken about a great deal – many people are using it as the latest buzz term when speaking about social media marketing. If you are truly authentic, you will see positive results and people will respond to what you are offering.
If you are authentic, that means you also are transparent. If you are transparent, you won’t withhold negative feedback you might receive about your business. In fact, you should bear in mind you stand to learn a great deal from whatever negative feedback you receive. People will respect you a great deal if you can take negative feedback, learn from the situation and improve upon what you are offering based on that feedback. In every business, there will be some negative feedback. It is not about the presence of the information; it is about what you do with it and how you learn from it.
Build Trust With Others
When it comes to doing business online, you need to establish relationships with others and you need to build trust on both sides. If people don’t trust you, they won’t interact with you and they won’t buy anything from you. Not only do you want to build relationships that are solid and will stand the test of time, you also want to turn your business connections into loyal clients. This takes time.
Loyal clients are not built in a day. If you manage to acquire loyal clients, another benefit is they will most likely tell their friends and colleagues about you and your business.
A great deal of your business’ success will come from word-of-mouth and that sort of loyalty will go a very long way. If you are going to succeed at developing that sort of relationship with your clients, you must be sure to communicate clearly at all times and always be sincere and transparent.
Be Good to Your People
Because the success of social media depends on relationships succeeding, you need all of the advocates who you can get a hold of. People who are willing to share your information are very powerful people for your business. You should do everything possible to make sure they continue to be advocates.
Behave Humanly
You should always treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Always recognize and acknowledge the value that other people with whom you interact professionally have for you. There are so many different ways in which you can deepen your relationship with other people. For example, if you have attended an event with one of the people with whom you share a professional connection, it is a good idea to follow up with that person after the event. You shouldn’t wait for the other person to initiate a meeting. You already have common ground – all you need to do is expand upon it. You have a wealth of connections. You just need to tap into it and start connecting.
Conclusion
Relationships are at the heart of social media – that’s why it works. The more solid relationships you are able to build and the more loyal clients you acquire, the better it will be for your business. When it comes to someone needing what you are offering, you want to be in the forefront of his or her mind. You want to position yourself as a subject matter expert and the way to do that is by developing as many top-quality relationships as possible. You want the relationships you have to be substantial. Just because they are established online doesn’t mean they aren’t significant. It is important to give the proper attention to your relationships and devote as much time as you need to make them stronger and stronger.
Resource:http://www.seo-news.com/relationship-building-through-social-media/

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SEO Simplified – What You Need to Know

When you first hear about SEO, taking in all the information can be quite overwhelming, especially when it seems much of the advice you are given is contradictory.
I am going to simplify the SEO process by giving you a rundown from beginning to end – that way, in the future, you will know when you are being given good or bad advice.

To be able to understand how SEO works and how to go about it you need two things.
• Common sense – never do what an SEO expert recommends without asking why they are doing it. Question their actions and come up with your own reasoning.
• Knowledge of what a search engine is and how it works.
Understanding what a search engine is and what it’s primary objective is…
In the beginning, the Internet was rather small – it contained maybe 1,000 or 2,000 websites.
There was no such thing as a search engine, and you would most likely find out about a website through word-of-mouth.
However, as the Internet grew, there was soon a demand for some kind of directory – kind of like a yellow pages for all the websites on the Internet. This would make it easier to find information you were interested in.
If you wanted to find plumbers, you’d go to the plumbers section and hopefully find some plumbers websites.
This was a good solution for a while, but a directory is only as good as the quality and quantity of the websites it has. As the Internet grew even bigger it was very difficult for the people running the directories to continually add and categorize each website.
What was really needed was an automated solution – some kind of robot that could do the job of human editors but a million times faster, it would have to find websites and sort thousands of them into categories everyday.
The search engine was born!
But let’s take a minute or two to think about that. A human can sort websites into categories pretty easily. A human just looks at a websites, reads a few paragraphs and knows instantly what the website is about.
But how about a machine? How can a computer, with no brain, work out what a website is about?
A computer may not be able to use intuition, but what it can do is count.
Let’s take this article you are reading now as an example. Using your intuition, under which category should it be slated:
• Home and Garden
• Kitchens
• SEO

Straight away, you said: “It’s SEO.”
Let’s look at how counting can bring the same conclusion. If you count how many times the word “SEO” appears on this page, you’ll find there are 14 occurrences, quite a lot in relation to all the other words that appear.
So just by counting, a computer can come up with a conclusion similar to that of a human.
All was good in search engine land. You could head over to a search engine; type in “dog” and it would give you a list of all the sites related to dogs.
But there was a problem; the listings weren’t always that useful. You would get a list of all the websites to do with “dog”, but they weren’t in any particular order, so you might have to scroll right to the 1,000th website before you found a website that had the information you needed.

So, how could this problem be solved?
The immediate solution is human intervention – to have a human revaluate the listings and put the better websites near the top of the listings. The trouble was, by this time, there were literally billions of websites and sorting them by hand would be an almost impossible task.
So we really needed the task to be automated, but how? How can a computer possibly work out which websites are better than others? How can a computer even develop an opinion?
This was a major headache until 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with an ingenious method.
They hypothesized that websites that had lots of other websites linking to them were probably the more useful resources.
Think about it, if you made a website would you link to any old website?
It’s not likely. But I bet you would definitely link to a really good website that would be beneficial to your visitors.
So, it becomes a counting game again. A search engine just counts how many websites are linking to another to determine where to rank it.
You now can see what the true purpose of a search engine is. To serve up listings that are helpful to the searcher – this is how Google intended it to be, and very importantly, this is how they want it to remain.
The other thing you should now understand is that a search engine is essentially a machine, it has no intuition – the best it can do is count. It outputs results that are dependent on what it counts.
The near downfall of search engines
Google was the first search engine to count the number of links and it has worked extremely well. The better websites usually appeared at the top.
As such, Google became the most popular search engine.
But Google’s success brought with it another problem. Because, so many people use Google, there is a great desire for website owners to be at the top of the listings. A top listing for an e-commerce store means loads of visitors, loads of sales and loads of money.
Soon SEO firms started popping up offering website owners a chance to get to the top of the search results.
But how could anyone offer this?
It was simple, they took advantage of the fact that search engines count. If you want to get top ranking for the keyword “dog” you would just repeat the word dog all over your website and create lots of false websites linking back to your website.
From Google’s point of view, this was terrible because it worked. It meant that search results could be manipulated and could end up ruining the quality of the listings. It meant that useless websites could be at the top quite easily.
Google had to find a way to stop it, before all search results became useless. It had to make changes to its algorithms so it could detect when results were being manipulated.
What they used were indictors of manipulation. Here’s just a few.
• If a websites suddenly gets a lot of links in a short space of time, this indicates some sort of manipulation, because it’s very difficult to get that many links so quickly.
• If a website gets links from lots of unrelated sites, this could indicate manipulation. Why would a chess website link to a custard website? It looks suspicious.
• Does a website contain a word too many times in proportion to other words? If there is a saturation of one word, this could look like someone has tried to manipulate results.
Google has lots of detection methods and when too many “manipulation flags” are scored, a website is punished with either a -30 in ranks, a -350 in ranks, a -950 in ranks or a permanent delisting.
So what is the job of an SEO expert now?
The same as it always was, to manipulate results for their clients.
A good SEO firm is always up-to-date on which methods work best.
Google obviously doesn’t disclose how they rank sites, otherwise everyone could manipulate results again.
But an SEO performs experiments, analyses results and comes up with conclusions as to how Google works.
So what do you need to know?
Essentially your SEO expert is your guide – he or she can show you how to improve your site so that it is worthy of links. He or she can also use manipulation tactics and try to do it under Google’s radar.
What you need to decide is how much risk you are willing to take. Every technique needs to be questioned. You need to ask if there is a good chance, a technique will pass through Google’s detection system or if it is likely to be detected by Google, which, in turn, will punish your website.
If you want to do things the safe way, you have two options:
Create a website that is very useful, one that is better than those offered by others in your field, then tell people about it and get many natural links from people who are linking to you for your content.
Or, use AdWords and pay Google to list your adverts alongside their regular listing.
Above all, use your common sense. Google is clever. If a technique is easy for a human to detect, then perhaps Google could find a way to detect it too. This does not mean you should disregard most manipulation techniques; they will almost certainly be required to get top ranks. What it does mean is that you must stay informed and always ask why an SEO expert has suggested a method before moving ahead with it, ask him or her if he/she has had any previous experience with a method and what he/she thinks the risk factor is.
Read More:http://www.seo-news.com

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