If you have read a handful of my previous posts, you will no doubt be aware of my belief that the most important part of SEO is the initial keyword research. Keyword research is a two fold process – not only do you need to know exactly what keywords attract regular traffic each month, you also need to know whether targeting a specific keyword is realistic in terms of cost, time and work involved.

There are many keywords which have such ferocious competition online that ranking page 1 with a new website would take such huge resource that any investor would be unlikely to see breakeven, let alone profit for some considerable time. In such instances, it is often cheaper and easier for a wealthy investor to look at buying one of the high ranking businesses/domain names.

However, no matter how competitive a niche maybe, there are always gaps. Uncovering these gaps is truly what separates successful online marketeers from the rest.  Following on from our last post which looked at ways of uncovering the most ‘profitable’ keywords from your research, today we’re going to look at how to gauge what competition exists online for your chosen ‘profitable’ keywords.

To make this task much easier, I highly recommend the excellent SEO plugin for Firefox. This is a free application that simply involves signing up to the SEOBook website. Once installed, open up google.co.uk (or .com) and search for one of your chosen keywords. You’ll notice that as page 1 of your results appear, the SEO plugin gives you a number of useful values on the website’s listed, including PageRank, no of incoming links, any listings in DMOZ or the Yahoo directory and more.

In an ideal world, the page 1 results for your chosen keyword would have:

1. URL’s with Low Numbers of Links. At the very least, one website with a low number (less than 250) links – as reported by Yahoo/SEO for Firefox – appearing within the top 5 listings is a good sign.
2. No Meta Title Keyword Targeting. No, or only 1 or 2, websites with the actual keyword written directly into the title. For example, if you were targeting ‘buy cheap shoes’ you would hope to see a  Google Results page as below (click to enlarge).
3. Web 2.0 Pages Ranking. Additionally, you would also hope to see a web 2.0 page (most likely an article) ranking within the top 10 results. Look out for listings from EzineArticles, ArticleBase and GoArticles which tend to rank highly for lower competition keywords.
4. New / Young Domains. Ideally, at least two of the listed page 1 domains will be 3 or less years old.

If you can uncover a keyword that reflects all of the above, you have a real hot SEO opportunity! Usually, your keyword target will have page 1 Google competition that reflects one or two points form the above, but not all four.  At this point it is more useful to look at your keyword competition in terms of what you should avoid competing against.

Here are the competition factors that are very hard to outrank with a new website:

1. Keyword Rich Domains. If all of the possible keyword rich domains for your target keyword (eg buycheapshoes.co.uk/.com/.net etc) have been snapped up and you see them ranking page 1 for your keyword, your in for a very tough SEO fight.
2. Aged Domains. If all of your page 1 competition have domains that are over 5 years in age, your shiny new website is going to have big problems persuading the mighty G that your just as trustworthy.
3. High Page Rank. Whilst PageRank may not be as key a factor as it used to be, it’s still very tough to push your new website past websites with PR of 4 and above . Ideally, for your target keyword you would hope to see a website with PR 2 or below ranking well.
4. Lots of Links. If every website on page 1 has over 2K links then you have some serious link building to do. If this high link number comes in combination with no 3 (ie high PR), then your battle is harder still.

Overall, most keyword choices comes down to thinking over the gaps that a keyword may have and balancing this against the beefier sites you see listed on page 1. Sometimes you may find that the top 3 listings are taken up by aged domains with high PR and lots of incoming links. There may however be opportunity to push into the page1 listings beneath these online giants. For high traffic keywords, such a  strategy can be worth pursuing. The important factor is to know what kind of fight your getting into before you step into the SEO ring.

One of the most important factors behind commercially successful websites is their ability to discover profitable traffic channels for their online products. Whilst Google’s Keyword Tool can help us oncover keywords that have regular traffic, it’s another skill to then go on and define which of these keywords will have the best conversion from ‘traffic’ to ‘sales’.

Hopefully, some of you will have already read my post from March this year on using Google tools to find better keywords. Certainly any website that becomes commercially successful has an element of luck involved. However, here are a few tips to help delve further into your keywords in an effort to uncover the ones that truly have SALES value.

1. Adwords Spend
If a keyword has a large number of PPC advertisers, there’s a very good chance that this keyword converts traffic to sales well. If you use Google Keyword Tool to uncover your keywords, you’ll be no doubt aware that you can view average PPC costs on any keyword found. However, I find a more reliable method is to simply use your own eyes and note down how many people actually pay for that keyword.  To do this, open google.co.uk and type in your keyword. Ideally, you would now see a full page of PPC advertisers appearing under sponsored links above and to the right hand side of your organic results (click below to enlarge).

IF you see any less than a full first page of PPC advertisers be wary of this keywords ability to convert to sales. Ideally, you would want to see 3 – 5 pages of different advertisers all paying for their PPC ads on pages 1 – 5 of Google’s results, this is an excellent indication that this keyword is easily monetised.

2. Google Shopping
Google Product Search is the area of the world’s most powerful search engine where you are able to search all of the products uploaded to Google’s Checkout database. This area of Google can be a real goldmine when searching for ‘conversion’ keywords. Type your main keyword into the search box at the top of the Google Shopping page, Google will instantly offer you a number of alternative keywords in a drop down menu that appears almost as you type.

Let this menu hover, write the most relevant of these suggestions down and now go back to Google’s Keyword Tool. Research all of the suggestions for traffic numbers and any further keyword ideas Google suggests. By using Google Product Search intially, you are now feeding the Keyword Tool with keywords that Google has told you have ‘sales’ traffic, hence your keyword results should be more commercially focused.

3. Google Discussion
Finally, after completing steps 1 and 2 above, take your best keywords, type them into Google and click on ‘Discussions’. Are people already talking about your keywords? If so, this final step serves as further verification that your keywords have high potential for sales conversion.

I hope the above tips help some of you to uncover more lucrative keywords for your projects. If any of you have your own fine ideas for keyword research do let me know, I’d love to hear them!

Today were going to look at how to take advantage of regional differences in Google results to find great links for your website. If you’ve ever browsed for your target keywords on google.com and then google.co.uk, you will no doubt have noticed the different results that Google delivers. These differences are of course for very good reasons. Google’s ethos is to give browsers the most relevant and useful results they can, hence it makes sense to give browsers using google.co.uk UK focused results and browsers on google.com US focused results. This theory runs true for every region of the world from Australia, India, Russia, Spain, France and right here in Argentina. Throughout many of our posts to date, we’ve looked at different ways of sourcing great links for your website. To date, all of these methods have been conducted in English. Yet it can’t be, and certainly isn’t, true that all great links come from sites written in English. In fact, there are many great link opportunities waiting out there for you in all of the major world languages. It’s a big, wide world out there and just think how many more links you might be able to source if you could do perform all of your link tricks across a variety of languages? Today, were going to look at how to do just that.

Google Global
All of the regional Google search engines end in the domain extension relevant to that country. Just as in the UK we have google.co.uk, in Spain they have www.google.es, in France www.google.fr, in Germany www.google.de and so on. To find the Google extension for the country your interested in, simply type ‘google COUNTRY’ into your search box. If your using Firefox, this handy extension lets you view results across different countries.

Google Translate Can Be A Very Good Friend
One of the most useful and fastest growing services online is Google Translate. This service allows you to instantly translate a phrase written in English into any of the major world languages. Additionally, this service also allows you to instantly translate any webpage out there from any major language into English. We’ll be using both of these features below.

Translating Your Keywords
In April we discussed a variety of ways to discover links for your website using common keyword terms, such as ‘KEYWORD add url’ or ‘KEYWORD add site’ and so on. It makes sense that these same search strings translated into different languages will deliver a host of new results – some of which will be fine links for your site. To translate a keyword search:

1. Browse to Google Translate at www.translate.google.com.
2. Type your search string in English into the box and select your language to convert it to (click image below to enlarge).

3. Now open up a new browser tab and browse to a relevant regional version of Google, for example if you translated your search string into Spanish go to google.es or google.com.ar.
4. Enter your translated search string.
5. Grab the url for your search result and go back to Google Translate.
6. Now paste into the box your url string and select your language conversion to translate back to English.

7. Google Translate will offer a new url that when clicked on will deliver your search results, from your foreign Google engine, in English.
8. As in the our April post, browse through these results for places to post your url.

On the example below, there are three places worth investigating for links that would not have been triggered by the English version of my search string (hotels add url). Working through a variety of English search strings translated for regional Google engines will of course reveal many more!

I hope the above method helps you think of many ways you can use all of your search based link building methods across a variety of new languages and regional engines. In essence, anything that’s working well for you in English should work equally as well in Spanish, French, German, Italian and any other language you wish to turn your methods too. Let me know of any great foreign language results you find!

Were here! It was a long journey, I’m only three hours into my ‘beginners’ Spanish course and I still haven’t mastered the art of crossing the road BUT it feels so good to here be in Buenos Aires. This city has the grandeur of Paris or Rome in places and everyday we find out something new about it. There are lots of expats living here, mainly from the USA, and it seems that a large amount of BA expats work remotely, or online. Likewise, it’s not just the expats who love the online here. As ever, my SEO eyes and ears are wide open – it doesn’t take long to discover that, just like back in the UK, the internet plays a huge part in people’s lives here. Here’s three things I’ve noticed already about online Argentinian life.

Facebook Mad
Yep, here in Argentina Facebook rules! Almost everywhere I go, every cafe, every bar, every museum, everyone has a Facebook page. Even the ‘Plaza De Mayo’, the most famous place in Buenos Aires (where Evita Peron addressed the people) has a Facebook page. From a web marketing point of view, I’d say Facebook Ads are definitely worth considering if you wish to promote your website in Argentina.

Fotolog
Cumbio is somewhat of a national celebrity here and all because she posts photos of her life onto the website fotolog.com. Cumbio is a flogger, one of many floggers who post images of their lives onto fotolog.com daily. Flogging is so big here, it’s even a fashion style – fringes grown over one eye, brightly coloured laces and V necked TShirts. If you have read the post titled ‘Create Ongoing Links Indefintely‘ then consider adding fotolog.com to your web 2.0 link list.

BA Expats
BA Expats is a great resource for those not of Porteno origin who find themselves enjoying life in this great city. As briefly mentioned above, the expat community within BA is growing rapidly and google seems to be acknowledging that. This website is only 21 months old and already has a PageRank of 6. Their forum is active, they encourage registration and their links directory is human edited.  Finding a way to link your website from sites like this one is a good thing – such sites attract lots of traffic and, perhaps more importantly, such links tell Google that your website is relevant to current world and online trends.

The old saying ‘a change is a good as a rest’ seems to be proving true for me so far in Buenos Aires. Next week we’ll get right back into SEO focused posts, but for now, I wanted to share the above with you and encourage you to look outside of your usual places for opportunities to promote your websites.

Over the next few days life is going to become a bit of an adventure. From Friday, and for the next 88 days, I’m going to be living and working from Buenos Aires. I’ve never been before, I’ve never worked 100% remotely before and right now my Spanish is hovering just above beginner! However, after a Sunday spent packing, recycling and planning – I really can’t wait!

Working online is an exciting way to earn a living. So much has changed in terms of how we market our businesses because of  the web and equally, so much is now possible for us as to where we run our businesses. In order to make this summer adventure possible, I’ve had to research and utilise a number of web driven resources. Once I’m settled in BA, we’ll get back to some solid SEO posts, but for now here’s the tools that have helped me  make this summer a remote control and adventurous one!

High Speed Internet Access
An absolute must and without which, none of the below would matter! Provided by an excellent apartment in the famous San Telmo region of BA.

Keeping In Touch
Email is one thing, but it’s good to keep in ‘voice’ contact with those that matter both professionally and personally. Skype is one of the greatest advancements of the web and certainly the best way to stay in close contact with anyone, wherever they are in the world. Especially for my trip, I also took out a Skype online number (with a Leeds code) so clients and contacts are able to call my laptop from conventional landlines and mobiles.

All Files Available Online
To work remotely, the web has to be your file server. I’ve used a combination of Dropbox and a very nifty service offered by Richard and Howard at Selestial. Selestial’s HQ is a CRM system that makes all H2 email, calendar, client contact and job notes accessible from a single url. This means that at H2 we can run jobs collectively from across the globe. My visit to BA has also pushed us to upload all of our individual work files too. This allows us to access all client design, coding and archived files via an extended Selestial system.

In addition to the above,  Dropbox offers an instant backup to everything I’m doing on my machine. I run a lot of my SEO tests and ideas outside of the company system. I also wanted to ensure all of my personal files (travel insurance, booking details etc ) were all accessible too. Dropbox provides an complete backup to absolutely everything I’m up to that is available instantly online and to any new machine I may find myself using.

Gmail
Part of storing all of your files online for me also involves taking full advantage of Gmail and their wonderful applications. Google let me store my ideas, notes, software reg details, favourite blogs and personal files and emails. Additionally, Google also has a good chat service which acts as a fine backup to Skype.

Delicious
The final part of making your work files available online comes, for me, courtesy of Delicious. This bookmarking service allows me to instantly access all of my numerous regularly visited webpages. As I use a number of online, 3rd party services in my SEO work, having them to hand wherever I go is a wonderful thing.

A Powerful Laptop
I’m a devil for running many things at once and hence I need a machine that’s happy to do so. When your working abroad, you also need a machine that’s easy to transport and carry around any new areas you may be exploring.  This blogpost is typed by my new ‘trip’ laptop which weighs only 1.8kg and comes with 4GB RAM and a dual core processor, more than enough to run all of my programs and browser plugins easily.

Remote working is more possible and easier than it ever has been, and I’m hoping I’ve got it right for me by using the above. If there’s anything you feel I could, or should, have looked at – do let me know. Next time, I’ll be posting from new shores and hoping to find some new SEO tips from the other side of the world!

If you read through last week’s post about ‘being social‘, particularly the section about ping.fm, you may have gathered that good work upfront can pay long term dividends for SEO. This especially true if you have more than one website to promote, or if you have ambitions to rank a number of urls on page 1 for the same keyword (we’ll delve more into this last thought next week ) Today, let’s look at three fine ways to spend your time in order to reap long term SEO benefits.

Ping.fm

As discussed last week, ping.fm allows you to update many social media profiles at once. This is very useful for letting both browsers and search engines know about any new content you publish. Additionally, every social profile post is one good link to your new content. Of course, there is some time consuming work in creating all of the profiles you need. However, this is a purely administrative task and requires no real knowledge of SEO, more a familiarity with the internet. As such, it’s an easy job to delegate if you have that luxury. If you’re simply ‘time limited’ right now, then I would suggest you create profiles for at least the following networks: twitter, identi, typepad, vox and posterous.  For an extra boost, note down the RSS feed urls for each of the profiles you create and submit these to as many RSS directories as you can.

SocialMarker.com

Similar in a sense to ping.fm, socialmarker.com allows you to submit your urls to up to 50 bookmarking websites at once. Bookmarking is especially useful in getting new content indexed quickly. As above, it is quite a job to register and approve all of the accounts initially. However, invest a little time now and you will produce a tool that you can use again and again to ensure all new content is indexed quickly and often within 48 hours.

If creating numerous social media and bookmarking accounts is not something you wish to create time for right now, have a look at Onlywire. Onlywire is a cut down version of ping.fm and socialmarker that submits your urls to a smaller number of profiles.

Ezinearticles.com

EZA is the daddy of article directories and definitely one of the best content driven links you can create for your websites. If you have recently created an account at EZA, you may have noticed that it takes up to 2 weeks to get your content approved and published. The good news is that things won’t always take this long. In fact, once you have successfully published 10 – 35 approved articles (the difference in number is dependent on the quality of your article submissions), your account will be upgraded to EZA ‘platinum’ level. From here on, you’ll see most of your articles being published within 48 hours of submission. Hence, it makes sense to get yourself to ‘platinum’ level as fast as you can! I recommend asking your friends, colleagues and clients whether they have any articles they would like you to publish online for them. It’s much easier to publish content your given than content you have to sit down and write – but do be careful, make sure that any article your given meets EZA’s strict guidelines!

If you can find some time to develop these three platforms, you’ll have three powerful SEO tools that you can use over and over again. Next week, we’ll look at how such tools can help you push your website AND strongest web 2.0 urls towards page 1 for your target keywords.

If you have kindly read a handful of my blogposts to date (thankyou if you have!), you might be coming to the conclusion that my SEO techniques centre around not only creating good links to your main website, but also finding ways to boost the power of those very links too. If you also happened to read the post on ‘Creating Ongoing Links Indefinitely‘, you might well know that the various well known social media platforms (ie Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) are some of the most powerful links you can create to your website.

As you have total control over your social media profiles, these pages are perfect places to create links not only to your main website, but also to every blogpost, article, video, podcast and any other pieces of content you publish online.  In this post, we’ll look at how to do that efficiently across a number of accounts and also how to boost the power of your social media profile pages.

Tweet, Facebook, Stumble & Everything Else Your Content

The essence of social media is to give the world quick insights into who you are and what you’re doing right now in your life. The problem with social media of course is that there are not too many things that happen in everyday life that the rest of the world is really interested in…cue ‘just watching Big Brother’ tweets! So, if your going to use social media to promote your business/website, you have to plan when and what you are going to say – a hot topic in it’s own right! For today,  let’s focus on the idea that if you are constantly creating new content to promote your online business then social media profiles are a wonderful place to tell the world all about it.

Firstly, telling the world about your latest article, blogpost, video etc via as many social media profiles as you can means you have a good chance of directing relevant traffic to that new content. Secondly, from a purely SEO perspective, that new content is far more likely to be crawled quickly now you’ve placed a few links to it from webpages that search engines love. Last but not least, a link to your new content from a social media profile page is a good link, if you also strive to build the power of your social media profile pages, then that link just gets stronger as you build.

Automating Social Media

Despite the points above, you’re probably thinking that you just simply don’t have the time to run a boatload of social media profiles. I agree, me neither! We need a little help to ensure our time invested pays dividends. Ping.fm is a free service that allows you to post messages to up all of the major social media networks at once. The only work you have to do is upfront – every social profile you wish to maintain has to be registered and setup. Not a fun job, but one that once done provides an ongoing and  useful link creation tool for any new content you wish to promote. Additionally, if you wish to utilise your social media profiles to promote your website/company news in a  more general sense, setting everything up via ping.fm will make this task far easier also. Well worth the effort I’d say

Boosting Your Profile Power

If you gone to all that effort to setup your profiles and ping.fm, it makes sense to also spend some good time building links to your profile pages. The more link power you can give your social profile pages, the more effective placing your content links on your profiles will be. My two favourite ways to boost social media profiles are:

1. Article Resource Box Links
Most article directories let you place at least two links within your resource box. Assuming that the first link will be to your main website, make the second link to one of your profile pages. You may remember this technique from a previous post, ideally you should make your social media profile urls part of your link action plan.

2. Feed Your RSS
Almost every social media profile has an RSS feed. Grab that feed and run it through the RSS directory submissions we discussed last month.

There is certainly a time element involved in running social media profiles. However, social media domains are (right now at least) favoured places for search engines. Hence, profile pages should play a significant role in your SEO strategy and once created, offer a quick and easy way to promote all new web content you publish.

It’s been a very busy week and hence, I’m keeping today’s post short but very sweet Today were going to look at how we can use the new Google features to deliver customised lists of great link opportunities.

What Are The New Google Features?
We discussed one of the new Google features, the wonder wheel, earlier on this year. Most of these new features are geared around offering the browser the ability to filter their search results as they require. Click on ‘more’ and ‘more search tools’ (as below) to view.

How To Use Search Tools To Deliver Link Opportunity Lists
You’ll notice that I searched for ‘cheap shoes’ on Google.co.uk – as shown in the image above. Likewise, perform a search for one of your main keyword targets. Google will return its results initially in it’s default manner. Now, click on ‘more’ first and filter results to show only ‘Blogs’, underneath now select ‘past month’ as below.

You now have a list of blogs already indexed by Google, topic relevant and active within the last month – great places to visit, place a comment and of course, a link back to your own website. Next, change ‘Blogs’ to ‘Discussions’ and you now have a list of forums and Q&A sites discussing your topic area within the last month. Again great places to contribute and place a link back to your website.

Finally, alter ‘Discussions’ to ‘Everything’ and now scroll down and select ‘fewer shopping sites’. This filter will give you a mix of blogs, forums, Q&A’s and many more kinds of websites where you may be able to place a link. Because we have selected to remove shopping sites, most of your direct competition, and hence places you are highly unlikely to gain a link, are removed. Your left with an interesting list of topic relevant places to visit and ‘link hunt’.

There you have three simple ways to use Google’s Search Tools to generate lists of new link opportunities. Playing with the search tools and clicking on different combinations of the filter settings will undoubtedly uncover many more, so play away and do let me know what you find!

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at much of the background surrounding SEO. We’ve gone through the notion of creating a new website from an SEO point of view, through targeting keywords, researching competition, indexing your new site and acquiring good links to it. More recently, we’ve looked at a newer form of SEO technique in utilising RSS feeds as part of your link building strategy. Today, were going to look at another activity I highly recommend you do in today’s online world – blogging.

Now, blogging is undoubtedly about far more than simply SEO. Some people blog for fun, some people blog because they have something to say, some people even blog because everyone else does…but all of these people have one thing in common, they want to be seen and read. There are many great thing about blogging, but I’m going to focus on why blogging is great for SEO.

So, Why Is Blogging Great For SEO?

Many people view blogs as having some ‘magical’ power to simply rank high within search engines for no apparently logical reason. The truth is that blogs are ‘magic’, but that this magic has a number of logical principles working away underneath. Knowing a bit about what these principles are can help you make your blog posts work better for you, and might also give you one or two ideas you can take away and apply when marketing your main website too. Here’s my summary of the ‘magic’ that underpins blogs…

1. Creating Content Consistently and Easily
Blogs are inherently easy to setup and run. By utilising an editing screen based largely around the common word processor interface were all used to, most people find blogs easier to update than websites using often more complex website CMS systems. Because a blog asks for open thoughts, opinions and words they are easier for most  us to write, especially when compared to more corporately driven websites which usually require us to stick to a brand style, tone and page word limit. As a result, we create more content because we have more freedom of expression.

There are three great things about creating ever increasing content. Firstly search engines love fresh content. If you update your blog often, they will visit your more often and generally reward you with higher rankings. Secondly, more and more content gives other blog and website owners more opportunities to read, enjoy and link to your pages – the more pages you have out there, the more unsolicited links you probably find you attract. The third great thing is actually our 2nd overall point, read below..

2. Catching Longtail Keyword Searches
When we looked at researching keywords in our earlier posts, we were primarily concerned with what we call ‘short tail’ keywords. Short Tail keywords are those keywords that are searched for regularly each month and tend to be the ones we web marketing types focus on – because they are predictable and measurable. Yet short tail keywords make up only 30% of all web searches. This means that 70% of all keyword searches are unique in some way and hence cannot be tracked or predicted. This in turn means that the webpages out there with the most words on them have the best chance of top ranking for long tail keywords. Blogs, by their nature, are a lot more about words than pictures and hence one of the major reasons they attract good web traffic is because they tend to catch long tail searches – our third great thing about content creation. Put simply, more content = more longtail traffic.

3. Auto Pinging & Other SEO Features
Because ‘blogging’ has come to be after the need for SEO grew, blog platforms have created their scripts with at least an element of SEO in mind.  One of the most useful features of a blog is their ability to ‘ping’. Pinging is the process by which you tell search engines and blog directories that you have some new content for them to crawl. Most of the major blog platforms have inbuilt functionality that instantly tells SE’s and directories when you have published a new post. This means that regularly updated blogs are crawled often and new blogposts can often indexed within hours of publication. In fact, if you have a regularly crawled blog, one of the easiest ways to get a new website indexed is to place a link straight to it from your high content blog!

Some of you may already know that I’m a huge fan of WordPress.  WordPress has a number of fantastic SEO plugins, in addition to pinging, that make the whole notion of optimisation so much easier.  If you’re a WordPress user and would like my list of favourite WordPress SEO plugins, send me a nice message from the contact page and I’ll happily oblige.

4. Opportunities To Spread Blog Content
Three weeks ago, we looked at ways of utilising articles again and again across a variety of mediums. Blog posts can be utilised in exactly the same way, in fact writing regular blog posts will give you more and more content to promote, convert and promote again.

There are a number of ‘exclusive’ places online where you can promote your  blogposts. The best of these are undoubtedly ‘blog carnivals‘. A ‘blog carnival’ is essentially a collection of the most informed blogposts on a specific topic. Featured blogposts will come from a number of blogs often spread throughout the world. To be featured in one offers you a highly relevant and highly powerful link which often has an immediately positive impact on your search engine rankings.

5. Another Domain, Another Feed
Your blog will require it’s own address to run from – isn’t this a great opportunity to go and buy another keyword rich domain? Just like your website, your blog can target ‘short tail’ keywords too – and so it should. Do your research and target another set of keywords that compliment the ones already chosen for your main site, if you get both your blog and your website ranking you’ll be making some serious dents online. Additionally, all blogs come with an instant RSS feed. Promote this feed throughout the directories we discussed last time, blend it, bookmark it, do everything you can to get links into it.

In many ways, blogs are actually easier to promote than standard websites. This is down to the fact that ‘blogging’ is what we call a web 2.0 property and hence comes ready made for the new online world of social networking, mobile sites and rss syndication.  Being web 2.0 ready means that a blog can be found, and marketed, in many places that websites simply cannot. Remember to link out from your blogposts to your main website when the opportunity arises. Anything that does good things for your blog will then also in turn feed through to your main site too.

So, if you weren’t blogging yesterday, how you been persuaded to start today?

Hello from sunny Cornwall!
If you followed last week’s post, you should know all about RSS feeds and how to both create and promote them. If you find RSS promotion works particularly well, here’s a quick trick on how to create more RSS feeds to promote and create more links from.

How To Blend Two Or More RSS Feeds

If you have submitted all of your article author, web 2.0 and website RSS feeds to a number of RSS directories, an easy way to create a new RSS feed to promote is by blending two or more RSS feeds together, creating a new one.

1. Login into your Feedage account.
2. Click on ‘RSS Blender’ on the left hand menu.
3. Enter your RSS feeds to blend.
4. Submit your new feed to the Feedage and other RSS directories.

When creating blended feeds, take a little time to think about what and why you are creating a new feed. You can blend content from other websites with your own to make a new feed based on a more specific topic/regional area. Think about why the new feed is ‘useful’, both to you and others – jotting down a few words about what makes your new blended feed unique will help in promoting it. There’s little point creating a blended feed of all of your existing site, author and other feeds when they have already been individually promoted. Create something new, with a slightly different slant that utilises your feed(s) as part of its information stream. This way you open your feed, and hence backlinks, out to new categories, niche directories and traffic sources.