Blogging for Dollars Blog

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital for your blog so that you get the most traffic. However, hiring an SEO firm is expensive, and doing it yourself takes lots of time.

Wonderful Marketing Sherpa has come up with some great, FREE tools to help you to do your own SEO.

There’s even a tool which is new to me MarketingSherpa: 7 No-Cost SEO Tools to Help You Increase Your Website Traffic:

“5. SeoQuake
http://www.seoquake.com/
Cost: Free
Description: SeoQuake is a Firefox plug-in that’s great for researching your search competition. It can resort search results based on a range of factors, including:
o Number of Web pages
o Number of links from Yahoo!
o Number of links from MSN
o Alexa rank
o Domain age
o Links from del.icio.us”

I’ll be adding SEOQuake to Firefox right away.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, SEO, rank, traffic

Although blogs are easy to manage when compared with a large static site, once you pass the 300 and 400 post mark you’ll feel a little out of control. Useful content gets lost.

There’s no easy solution to content management on a large blog but Chris Pearson’s post on WordPress categories is helpful.

What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories — Pearsonified: “Because of the way they are misused all over the Web, categories have grown to become something that we regard in a purely user-centric light. We think of them as navigational tools and guides for users, but in reality, categories are a powerful tool that bloggers can use to exercise precise control over content in a dynamic environment.”

OTOH, you can just ignore it all and keep blogging.

Imagine… $1,000 A Week For Just Ten Hours

You can get paid to blog. The current rate for experienced bloggers is around $1,000 to $1500 a week for from two to five posts a day – VERY nice writing income.

Find out how to blog with the blogging best-seller “Blogging For Dollars: How to become a career blogger — in your PJs, if you want”. It’s my complete new ebook package, with free coaching/ consultations as well.

Technorati Tags: blogging, categories, content, tags, SEO

Apparently there’s been a recent Google PageRank update which has smacked many top ranking blogs and sites. Andy Beard’s “DIGG FAVORITES SLAPPED BY GOOGLE” has a list of some of the sites.

He says:

After the very controversial hit many sites took just 2 weeks ago for various degrees of selling PageRank or linking to clients, you might have thought Google would take a breather, but Google it seems hadn’t even started its crackdown.

Not sure what PageRank is? Here’s an article.

I don’t pay much attention to PageRank on my sites. I use Mac’s Safari browser, and need to switch to Firefox to check PR, so I tend to stay blissfully unaware of changes in PR.

There are many theories as to why Google appears to have penalized some sites.

Will this affect your blog? No one knows – but keep an eye on your PR if you’re selling ad space and text links and are concerned.

If your PR drops, relax: a good blog is a good blog, no matter what its PR happens to be.

If you’re just starting your blogging career, here’s my blogging guide, which will help you to establish a great blog quickly.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, PageRank, penalties