As a blogger, my biggest focus is gaining viewers. A huge door will open up for me once I reach the 760 mark in Technorati. Right now, that is the last blog in the top 100. If I reach that, chances are that I will surpass it. Getting in the top 100 of Technorati means more traffic, and more PageRank.

Right now, I sit at 431 in Technorati and that is a 200 lift from a couple days ago. I suspect I will reach my goal in under a month. In the meantime, I am focusing on the posting.

Believe it or not, even though you control your domain name, other people can hijack your traffic. How they go about it is not illegal, but it is very unethical. Unfortunately, Google is vulnerable to this tactic, while Yahoo! Is not.

The method people use to hijack a website is called a “302 redirect”. It is a method used in a hosting account to notify search engines that your website has moved to another domain. The problem is, anyone can use a redirect and specify YOUR DOMAIN in their settings. What happens afterward is that Google indexes the new website, but shows YOUR domain as the URL in search results. This essentially steals the traffic that your website would normally be getting.

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My blog is a work in progress. While I have had lots of successes overcoming obstacles, I still have a lot of posting to do to reach my 1,000 mark. In the meantime, it is important to remember that my traffic is going to have to come from sources other than Google. 1/3rd of my traffic comes from search engines at the moment. This leaves another 3rd that comes from direct access for those who have bookmarked me or know my url. The last 3rd is from referrals. Referrals are your biggest asset when you first start your blog, and all the way to the time where you reach the 1,000 post mark. When you do reach 1k, you can depend on search engine traffic more. Right now, I past 100 posts and climbing daily, so I rely on the other kinds of traffic to build my audience. I do get some excellent search engine rankings and traffic though, so it’s all good.

There are different types of referrals. The first I will mention comes from the links that you use in your comments on other blogs. You can find other blogs related to your topic, and even ones unrelated that you find interesting. When you comment, make sure you include your url in the area provided if that blog has the feature activated. You will find that the traffic from blog comments are both the blog owners themselves, and other people who read that blog and it’s comments. I find myself traveling to lots of blogs and commenting often. You really have to locate blogs that are talking about a topic you are interested in, otherwise you will just bash your head in trying to come up with something to say. You can find a blog directory by doing a Google search and locate a blog by it’s category.

Good places to locate blogs:

• http://www.technorati.com/
• http://blogsearch.google.com

Another type of referral comes from forum signature and profile links. When you take part in forums, they usually allow you to include a signature with your posts. Every single time you post on the forum, your link will be posted in your signature as well. This will get you lots of traffic from other forum members reading that forum thread, and others who read your profile. You can easily find forums by doing Google searches. An example of a Google search for a forum would be “search engine optimization forum”, or “Mercedes Benz forum”. You will find that if you are a regular and your post count increases in the forum, you will get more signature traffic from it. People tend to check out links belonging to those who are active users.

A third kind of referral comes from articles and press releases that you write. You can publish them on free article and press release sites which tend to get a lot of readers and search engine rankings. You also benefit from the inbound links on these ones most of the time. You will see a ton of free article and free press release websites available by doing a search for them, and that number increases regularly. These kinds of websites are popping up all of the time because it’s owners want to benefit from all of that free content submitted from it’s users.

Some article and press release sites I use:

• http://www.freearticlepublishing.com/
• http://www.upublish.info/
• http://www.amazines.com/
• http://www.adzines.com/
• http://ezinearticles.com/
• http://www.associatedcontent.com/
• http://www.goarticles.com/
• http://www.zingarticles.com/
• http://www.free-press-release.com/
• http://www.prlog.org/
• http://www.i-newswire.com/
• http://www.1888pressrelease.com/
• http://www.free-press-release-center.info/
• http://www.pr.com/press-releases
• http://www.freepressrelease.com/
• http://www.prfree.com/
• http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/
• http://www.onlineprnews.com/
• http://www.newswiretoday.com/
• http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/
• http://www.prleap.com/
• http://freepressindex.com/
• http://www.przoom.com/

The 4th kind of referral comes when you establish your blog a bit, and other webmasters find your website to be a valuable resource or a place worth mention. They want to link to you because they want to share you with their followers. I have already received special mention from a few good guys and girls out there who’s blogs I visit frequently. You can assist people who want to link to you by providing them with banners and/or html linking codes. I don’t have any here as of this article, but I may in the future. I use them on other sites that I own.

Look for opportunities everywhere to build your blog traffic. It is vital for your survival as a blogger, and to keep your motivation strong. If you work hard in the beginning so that your traffic is strong, you will get past that benchmark of catching a loyal following. If you spend your time thinking about how everything isn’t working fast enough, you will end up closing up shop before your blog ever had any chance to make it big.

Managing a blog is not a task to take lightly. It is labor intensive, and will eat up a good chunk of your time. That’s why it is understandable that people sometimes make mistakes. The key is to recognize those mistakes and correct them from then on.

A few of those mistakes are:

• Uncategorized blog posts:

This is a big offender. I have made that same mistake, even here on this blog. You work hard on an article making sure that it is not only lengthy, but fully informative and not lacking key points. Then you make sure it has all the right post tags and meta tags. What happens next is that you mistakenly hit publish before assigning a category or two for your post.

OOPS! At this point, it is best to leave it because chances are, search engines and blog directories have already been pinged. You don’t really want to go in and remove it from uncategorized and replace it with something else because Google could already be on that category indexing it. You CAN go in and add another category to that post if you like though.

I understand how easy it is to make the category mistake, but it is important that it does not happen often. You are losing out that way by not having an important keyword in the url. To avoid this mistake, you can remember to slow down before you publish. Go over every single thing on that post before you continue. In wordpress, start on the left where your post content is, then work your way to the right side and check the publish date and time, then the post tags, then the category. If you have a meta tag plugin that allows you to edit them, make sure they have the right density before you go further.

• No SEO:

Your WordPress should be as search engine friendly as they get. Blogs are meant to be search engine friendly as it is in a blogs nature. You should ensure that you have the plugins installed to help with this. Look over the basics such as the url, and set your permalinks so that the urls are not dynamic. You can also install one of the many seo plugins available for download.

Search engine optimization is a key factor in the way that Google and other biggies look at you. Without seo, you are reducing your blogs potential for top 10 rankings.

The good thing is that with blogs, you don’t really need to hire a seo professional like myself. All you have to do to get top 10 rankings is post on a daily basis. Get those original articles out there, and install tracking like Google Analytics. Watch where your traffic comes from.

• Micro-Blogging:

Micro-Blogging was made popular with services such as Twitter. Some people don’t understand how to use that tool though, and they end up posting two-liners on their actual blogs. Your blog should be a place where you can post decent size articles that hold some actual value to the reader. You can utilize tools like Twitter to bring traffic to your blog, but it shouldn’t be your business model to emulate them.

There are good plugins for WordPress like wp-to-twitter which will automatically post your latest blog article using a url shortening service like bit.ly or cli.gs. I use it on this blog and it comes in handy. You will notice if you went to my twitter that it posts a portion of my articles and links back to the lengthy original. Doing this will help you get followers, as long as you actually write content with meat in it. If you micro-blog on your blog then you will just turn away that reader for life.

• Being greedy:

I understand that you want to monetize your blog. But you can make that happen faster if you allow people to help you. After you have posted on your blog for a month or so regularly, you may get an email from an aspiring author wishing to guest post on your blog.

Guest posting on blogs bring in traffic to your own blog. Other authors know this, and they want to take advantage of it too. The good thing is that their original article will actually help your blog by giving it fresh content, and the traffic/rankings it might bring in.

It is important that you allow guest bloggers that can write an article on your target topic(s). Just say yes!

This is not a complete list, but the fact is that you will have to learn as you go just like everyone else. If you follow these pointers, you will have a good starting point to help you run with it and never look back.

I am a web designer and internet marketing expert offering a custom wordpress blog with all of the best seo and social media plugins installed, new social networking accounts created and established, and daily blog posting for 2 entire months. All of this will create a highly developed blog with lots of traffic, all for only $5,000 flat fee. You can decide to continue the daily posting for $1,000 per month afterward.

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Alexa is much more than a search engine. They are also a web data company that provides important statistics. Statistics which show you how popular a given website is. I have been watching my Alexa rank for awhile now, and I have made some amazing achievements since the start of this blog. Actually, I have made a huge improvement since yesterday alone.

The reason I am watching my Alexa traffic details is because I can use it in many ways, one of which includes appearing in the movers and shakers section and benefiting from the traffic it will bring me. In addition, it allows me to track my success as I go along and improve upon it as the need arises. The graphic to the left displays me with a huge gain of over 18 million points. I aim to be below 100 which will make my blog one of the most popular sites in the world.

Alexa isn’t really a search engine to optimize for. It is more like a tool which can be used in a number of ways. If you are just starting out with a website, I suggest watching your Alexa rank as it changes. This will motivate you by showing you that you’ve made some progress, even if you havn’t seen it in revenue yet.

I expect to be below the 3 million mark within the next couple weeks. Maybe sooner.

Link Popularity is the amount of links pointing to your site from other sites. The more links you get to your site the better. Of course some links are better than others. For example. FFA Pages are usually completely ignored so if you have thousands of FFA Page links then it is not helping out your site unless someone goes through and clicks on the link. Not very many humans actually visit FFA Pages but there are a couple that do.

A Link from the Yahoo homepage though will probably guarantee your website a top ranking. For that you would need to afford the $10,000 per day to advertise on the homepage. For a small business, a link from the Yahoo directory will suffice.

DMOZ.org is another popularity directory and has an influence on Google rankings, but mainly because Google uses ODP data directly. Just submit your website according to their guidelines and leave it alone. If they list you they list you but DMOZ is not the only game in town so don’t get bent out of shape about it.

Links can be bought from link brokers. Some are a one time fee and some links cost you a monthly fee. If you decide to go this route do not purchase more than 5 links per month. Going over that may look to the search engines like you are trying to manipulate results. You also want to make sure the sites you are buying links from have your link on a high PageRank webpage. This ensures that your website gets the proper PageRank instead of possibly cheapening it.

Write articles and submit them to websites who will publish them. Make sure you provide your name and URL which will be published with your article. This is a great way to get links to your website. A good way to find relevant article sites is to simply search google or yahoo for “your keyword +articles” and remember to use the quotes. This is so the search engine knows you are looking for both words/phrases on the same page.

Once you collect your article sites, write an informative article. You do not want to self-promote. The only thing you need from the article is the one way link to your site and possibly the name recognition. Simply submitting your articles is a killer way to generate one way links.

Put out press releases. You do not want to send them out for every little happening at your company but when something comes up that is news worthy by all means let people know about it. If you send it they will come. Make sure you put the press release in the proper format. There are many ways to generate links to your website. Do your research and be persistent. If you follow those rules you will be fighting off business in no time.

I have written in the past about building website traffic, but I thought I would elaborate specifically on blogging. I consider my blog not only a way to interact with my readers, but also a personal solution for getting things off of my chest.

This blog has done pretty well with building traffic. I am up to many thousands of hits per month (amount classified, sorry). The reason for the regular increase in traffic is that I post regularly, and utilize social networks and social bookmarking websites. I try to get my posts republished when I can, and I write articles for big publications like Associated Content and EzineArticles to name a couple.

Your biggest obstacle for increasing traffic is yourself. It is hard to build a blog when you can’t see people commenting, or more than a few hits in your stats tracking program. Once you realize that it takes time to get a hundred comments on a single post, you can focus more on the content of the posts that you write. If you are able to realize this at the beginning of your blog, then your blog can be filled with quality posts right from the beginning.

Writing quality posts are what attracts links. If your articles are informative, someone who was looking for that information will be more likely to link back to your article from their own blog or website. This is called “viral linking”. You also receive the benefits of viral linking when you write articles for article website like EzineArticles. Those article publishing websites allow republishing of your expert articles, and re-publishers are required to provide the credit to the original author (you). That credit can be a link to the authors website (or blog). You get the benefit of traffic from another webmasters marketing efforts.

After awhile of posting to your blog, you will gain many top 10 rankings for various keywords and keyphrases. Some of which you would be surprised to see in your stats tracking program (I use analytics and google webmaster tools). Because of your continuous posting, you will end up with thousands of pages on your blog being indexed by search engines. You will attract a loyal following and get those illusive reader comments on your blog.

You may be someone who posted some personal information online, and later regretted it. Or perhaps you are the victim of a blog author who wanted to get revenge for some reason or another. Maybe you are on the receiving end of a bad business transaction, and the other party posted your name on a consumer reporting website.

Online reputation management is actually an industry that specialized in reverse-seo. I am actually one of the original reputation management professionals. Then after a short period of time, many copy-cat seos started adding bad press removal to their service list. The good thing to know is that I am about to provide you with the information that we know…for FREE!

Social networking is vital

When you want to get the bad press off of the first page of search engines, the first thing you need to do is create an entire “brand” for your name. Social networks are a great way to do this. They allow you to network and build a large amount of links to your social profile (and website). In addition, social networks have a lot of clout in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live.com. They tend to rank very high for personal names as well as company names.

Your social networking list should include but be limited to:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Digg
• Delicious
• Diigo
• LiveJournal
• flickr
• Technorati

Remember that this is a short list. There are a good number of popular social networks that you need to join and participation in.

Blogging creates content

If you blog, you add lots of fresh content that gets indexed by search engines. Blogs actually help more than you can imagine. If you setup a wordpress blog on your own domain with your name in it, and blog daily, you can get some top 10 rankings for that domain. In addition, you can integrate social networks into your blog with free plugins.

A good thing about blogging is that other websites tend to use content from blogs. Your content gets syndicated and used by scrapers which link back to your blog. Those websites can rank very well for your name which helps push down the bad website using your name.

Stop the press!

Or add to it… Press releases are a great resource. Free press release websites rank on the 1st page fairly easily. You can realize 3 or 4 top 10 spots by using press release websites alone. Their content tends to get picked up by other websites. This can add to the top 10 rankings if those websites have decent PageRank and traffic.

Experts prevail!

On top of press releases, free article publishing websites also rank high on search engines such as Google. If you have a decent ability to write articles, you can do some damage in the serps. Your expert articles can be reused by webmasters looking for fresh content. Article sites require publishers of reusable content to link back to the original author or the authors profile on the free article website.

Keep your head up…

I know it is tough seeing your name being used in a negative way. If you work hard to get positive text content out there, the end result will be success. Don’t let your initial lack of results disappoint and depress you. These are proven solutions to the problem of negative press.

Need a professional to remove defamation online? Try helprepair.me and turn bad press into positive press today!

I have been in the seo business for over a decade. Over the years, I have become an expert in this field, and often get clients who have websites that lack any kind of seo whatsoever. Some of these clients have basic static html websites. Those are the easiest to optimize for search engines.

I am going to use this blog post to explain the specifics behind optimizing a static website. The best way to go about this is to start from the beginning with no website at all.

Design with SEO in Mind

Your search engine optimization should start in the design phase. When you slice the psd image into web based graphics, you need to name those images properly. Your file names should match what the website, and pages contain. An seo website should have images named seo.jpg, seo-1.gif, etc. Your navigation buttons can be named accordingly like the homepage for example. It can be home.gif. It is also wise to add alt text to each image that is linked to content. Your header image can have alt text that describe your website. Your navigation button to your contact page should have alt text that says “contact us” or “contact our (CompanyName)”.

Links are Important

Using text links are best. You can get by with image links, but text can be made to look nice by using css (cascading style sheets). Your navigation links should be located on every single page of your website. This is a part of what they call “web 2.0). Your visitors (and search engines) should be able to access any page of your website through a link on the page that they are on.

When you provide a link to another website, you should use the rel=”nofollow” tag within that link so that you are not bleeding PageRank, or penalized for linking to an unrelated or “bad” website.

Hidden Code and What Search Engines See

Use meta tags. Regardless of what so-called expert seo professionals will tell you, meta tags DO matter. Just not as much as they used to. However, having meta tags that do not match the content on that exact page can hurt you greatly. It’s best to have meta tags, and take the time to ensure that they match the page content. Do not use the same meta tags on every single page.

Avoid black hat tricks. In the old days, inserting invisible text that matches the background of the website used to help you get a first page result. Now it will just get your website from that search engines index. The best thing it can do is just get your penalized so that you are nowhere to be found on the top search results.

Content is King

In case you havn’t figured it out, text content is what brings in the traffic (and the spiders). This is the reason that I have blogs on my many websites. Blogs allow you to add content with little effort. In the case of static websites, you have to consider the fact that fresh content should be added on a regular basis. If you have a static website, consider how easy it is to add a blog. That way you can simply login and use a wysiwyg system to add the content easily.

From Here On…

I can give you all of the answers, but I would rather provide the basics above, and let you learn the rest through trial and error. Start with the information I provided, and track your progress.