SEO Hosting Blog

Blogging seems to be the ideal solution for many things, one of which being SEO. Many people know this, and even more learn this, but I wonder if people often understand why having a blog is important for SEO. Basic and very practical SEO Tips tell us that we should avoid bad coding, use relevant keywords, be conscious of where we place them in text, and get inbound links. Considering these tips, then a blog is an ideal solution for SEO.

Let’s consider coding. Both WordPress and Blogger maintain excellent coding standards. Each platform comes with a standard (approved) template that meets the W3C standards. Actually, Blogger comes with around 25 and WordPress only has one. In both platforms, however, there are hundreds of open sourced templates available that also meet the coding standards. These templates can be downloaded and installed at no charge. (more…)

Have you seen the People of Walmart website? Perhaps, you’ve already contributed and uploaded a picture or two? I find it interesting how certain things go viral on the Internet. Typically, I see low grade YouTube videos or cheesy webpages hit it off on the web. And so is the case with a newly launched blog called People of Walmart. It went viral, people love it, and the way I see it, for site owners, there is a lot that can be learned.

People of Walmart is very simple self-hosted WordPress blog that allows users to contribute content. In this case, it can be a picture of an unusual person found at Walmart. Users who want to contribute must submit the photo by email and manually include a title, description, and include tags. After editors review the picture, it will be published on a blog post. These are called Wal-Creatures.

With over 15,000 fans on FaceBook, People of Walmart has grown very quickly and has captured the interest of thousands of people almost overnight. The site has been of huge interest to FaceBook users, and with over 700 people following on Twitter, awareness of the site seems to be spreading into other networks as well. But, what about SEO? Once the viral buzz wears off and the sudden spike in traffic dwindles down to a trickle, where will the site stand in the SERPS?

My prediction doesn’t look very promising. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether the owners of People of Walmart make changes or not, one thing remains possible: You can make changes to your own site. Granted, your site might not go viral like theirs, but if it does, you’ll at least be ready. And as I had mentioned above, a lot can be learned from People of Walmart. And no, I don’t think People of Walmart will last very long after the buzz wears thin. The reason why is because of their lack of SEO. (more…)

Yahoo! has had it’s share of struggles over the years. As we are all well aware, the company has been faced with the challenges of keeping up with the trends of social networking. It has been a rough and costly journey. You may recall the closing of Yahoo! 360 and announced the closure of GeoCities happening this October.

I would more say that Yahoo! has been behind the social networking wave and have been struggling to keep up. Recently, Yahoo! made an update to their homepage which made an attempt to attract and retain users to their site by offering new widgets that allow users to access their accounts from some of the more popular sites online such as FaceBook. To drive the company forward even further, Yahoo! has unveiled a new FaceBook style feature in Yahoo! Mail, which gives users the ability to post status updates. These updates have a very similar feel like FaceBook or Twitter. At this point in time, I think Yahoo! is better off continuing to develop ways to cater to social networking rather than compete with the contenders within the social networking.

One of the most breaking news occurred today with Yahoo! announcing the acquisition of a popular Arabic Internet services site called, Maktoob.com (#1, #2, #3). At this time, the price Yahoo! paid is not known. The acquisition is estimated to be fully complete by forth quarter of this year. (more…)

Back in February of this year, Twitter was ranked as one of the fastest growing websites and had a reported growth of over 1300 percent. It’s rival site, FaceBook, reported only a growth of over 225 percent the same month. While a 225 percent growth sounds great, it’s not even in the same league as Twitter. So with the popularity of Twitter, I am sure it comes to no surprise that there are people who create spoofs or parody sites in an attempt to capture some of the attention and traffic. And so we have a site called Woofer.

Woofer is just like Twitter. The only difference is instead of limiting characters to 140, this spoof site forces users to use 1,400 characters or more before being able to publish. A lot of interest has been generated and Woofer seems to be taking off pretty rapidly. The large reason why is because people are using Twitter to tell their friends about it by sending their own Tweets that point links to their Woofer page.

The spoof site is interesting and actually has some short term potential. In terms of being an online publisher, I always look for ways to accumulate user generated content. As an online publisher, content is worth merit. The more user generated content I have, the less I have to write myself or pay someone else to do. Woofer has quite a bit of value simply because users are volunteering their time to write 1,400 characters of unique content. (more…)

Common in the insurance business you will hear things like the 80/20 plan. What that means is some insurance plans will cover 80% of the bill while leaving you with the remaining 20% balance. With Internet marketing, I have coined my own 80/20 plan and indeed put it into practice.

My business is mainly in developing niche sites that are run using WordPress. I write content that targets very high paying keywords in Google AdWords. My content indeed is very well written, unique, useful, entertaining and informative. The goal in mind though is to monetize it using Google AdSense. Some content I write that targets certain keyword phrases need a little more boost than others. Most of my content targets longtail keywords. However, some do not and need additional love.

The 80/20 plan that I follow is very simple. I invest 20% of my time writing content and 80% of my time marketing it. Depending on the strength of competition of the keyword phrases I am targeting will dictate the level of depth I go into marketing each article or page I create. For me, Internet marketing is a primary method of promoting my content on the Internet. It combines two elements: search engine marketing and social network marketing. (more…)