Are you looking for some inside information on SEO? Here’s an up-to-date report from SEO experts who should know.

A ‘Page Rank’ is a number Google gives to a web page that represents how important Google thinks the page is on the web. When one page links to another, Google considers it to be effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more ‘votes’ there are for a page across the whole web, the more important that page must be. But that’s quite an assumption, isn’t it?

The importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself really is, meaning in Google calculations a page’s importance comes from the votes cast for it. These votes are then taken into account when the page is ranked.

As a general rule of thumb, Google Page Ranks along with Alexa ratings are the best indicators of how well your SEO work has been going. Granted, the ranking that you appear in on the results for your most important key words is the real indicator, but a strong Google Page Rank will help to boost this position substantially. The more links that you have pointing at your site, the better off you are. That’s a basic rule that will apply throughout your SEO operations.

Page Rank matters because it’s one of the most influential factors that determine a page’s ranking in Google’s search results. If you want to have good Page Rank, you’d better make sure people are linking to your site.

Well, don’t jump the gun and try to get your site linked from everywhere you can, because Google doesn’t count every link. They have started filter out links from known ‘link farms’ (sites that are nothing but big lists of links), and being linked to or from these kinds of sites will get you penalized by Google. Be careful out there. They have also implemented a new relevance calculator that (true to its name) tries to determine how relevant the links into and out of your site are. The most important factor here is that Google considers long lasting links more meaningful than a recently published link.

The best way to increase your page rank is to contact people with relevant and complementary content (that is, content that does not compete with your own but that enhances it). These links are most likely to last and they will not only increase your Google Page Rank, but they will also provide relevant hits via the links themselves.

The more authentic information about SEO you know, the more likely people are to consider you a SEO expert. Read on for even more SEO facts that you can share.

How is PageRank Calculated?

Google calculates the PageRank PR of all pages it indexes, taking into account all the links to and from each site. When a page ‘votes’ for other pages by linking to them, it shares out some of its PageRank value amongst these pages.

This algorithm means that a link to your site from a page with PR4 (i.e. a Page Rank of 4) and five outbound links would be worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and a hundred outbound links. It’s not just the Page Rank of the page that’s important, but also the number of links it has.

The more links there are on a page, the less Page Rank value your page receives from them. You should also remember that it takes progressively more Page Rank to move up a level. It is generally pretty easy to achieve a Page Rank of three. Once you achieve a Page Rank of four, your site is getting formidable. Increasing past this mark may prove difficult and will require very important content. Reaching 8+ is very difficult. These ranks are usually reserved for sites that are crucial for the functionality of the internet.

Each time you add a link, or a page that links to you adds a link, you run the risk of lowering your PageRank. Make sure that you have as few links as possible, and so do any sites that are associated with you.

Google repeats its PageRank calculatons many times at each update, and each time the calculation is made it gets more likely to be accurate. Total accuracy can never be achieved, however, because one site’s PageRank is entirely relative to the others’. You should understand that the results searchers end up with can really only be properly worked out by Google, because they’re the only ones with access to the whole index.

Is there really any information about SEO that is nonessential? We all see things from different angles, so something relatively insignificant to one may be crucial to another.

Need to make money fast, but you don’t want to spend a single cent to establish an online business? Fret not, dear friend. You could actually start earning from the web with zero capital, zero obligations and zero risks! All these can be accomplished within 24 hours! Read on and I’ll show you how.

Hour 1

Try to find a profitable niche. Niches are highly specialized segments of a market where the demand is high and the supplies are low. There are few competitions in a niche, allowing you more opportunity to establish your online presence.

Think of a market that you could cater to. Then narrow it down by enumerating its subcategories. The more you are able to reduce the subject, the higher the profitability will be. For example, the general market you thought of is about dogs. A subcategory of this would be about Chihuahuas. A further subcategory would be about Chihuahua grooming.

Hour 2

Once you have found your niche, run a search at www.wordtracker.com or www.nichebot.com . The results would show how many searches were made for that subject. The more searches there are, the higher the demand is for that topic.

Run a similar search of the same subject in any of the search engines on the net. The results would reveal your competition. Naturally, you would want a subject that has less competition. This would mean that you’re looking for one that would produce few results in your searches.

Hour 3

Once you’ve found a lucrative niche, it’s time to look for its relevant keywords. Run a search of the topic at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox to get a list of related keywords and keyphrases. Keep a copy of this list.

Hour 4

Open an account with a free blogging site. Or, if you already have your own website, download the Wordpress software at www.wordpress.com . It’s free. And Wordpress can be easily integrated with any website.

Set up your account. Fiddle with the controls. You’ll discover that using a blog is as easy as writing down your thoughts and clicking on a button to publish them for all the online world to see.

Hour 5

Enroll in any affiliate program of your choice. You could choose more than one, of course. Just make sure that such program is offering some products that cater to the niche you have chosen. Try to find a program that offers highly sellable products and generous commissions. Don’t settle for a commission rate of less than 20%. Look for something that would give you at least 40% for every successful sale you would be able to refer. A good place to start is www.clickbank.com , but eventually you would want to “graduate” to something grander. But for your initial foray, ClickBank would suffice.

After enrollment, you would be able to immediately choose the products you want to pre-sell. Get the affiliate links for them. Do not lose these affiliate links.

Hour 6

It’s time to put that blog to good use! The premise heart of this budget-friendly strategy is your blog. Blogs are excellent and cost-effective alternatives to websites. Search engines love them, and they have their own linking network as well. Also, they are easily updateable, and search engine spiders love consistently updated content.

Write an interesting piece about the niche you have chosen. It may be a personal review of one of your affiliate products, or your views on the niche in general.

The trick here lies in being able to strategically insert your affiliate links in your blog entries. It must be subtle. You won’t want your blog to look like a blatant sales page. Your entries should be highly informative, first and foremost. Content is still king, and it is what will drive visitors to your site.

Hour 7

Go to www.pingomatic.com . Ping the blog directories and the search engines that can be found there. This would inform their spiders that your content has been updated, and they will check it out come the next relevant query. What does this mean? Fast indexing for your blog site!

So there you go. A zero dollar, seven hour marketing plan that would rake in some earnings. It doesn’t stop there, however. Try to post a new entry everyday, and ping the search engines afterwards. Soon enough, you’ll have a high traffic blog site where you could expose your affiliate links to a whole lot of people!

Good luck!

Writing a blog can be fun and exciting, but it can also be rewarding. If you do not know how to make money from your blog content then you need to consider implementing the following suggestions in your blog.

Make Money Tip #1 Adsense
Adsense is an incredible service offered by Google to help you make money and help others advertise as well. Basically, with Adsense you choose several ads that blend or complement the information talked about in your blog. Then, when individuals click on the ads that are present in your blog, you receive money! Best of all, Adsense is free to use on your site, so this is a great opportunity to make money without really having to do very much.

Make Money Tip #2 Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate programs are another great way to make money as well and work on the same premise of Adsense. The web surfer has to click on the affiliate websites link and when they do so they are redirected from your blog to the link they clicked on. You will get paid affiliate income for the click, and if they make a purchase when they are on that website you will get paid affiliate income again.

Make Money Tip #3 Blog Ads
Blog ads can help you make money as well. Blog ads are not too different from Adsense or Affiliate marketing, but they are in the sense that blog ads connect web surfers with advertisers. Then, when any ad placements are made a commission is exchanged.

Make Money Tip #4 Business Blog
You can use your blog to simply converse about any topic that is important to you, but you can also use your blog as a tool to help you make money. Advertise your business services; make your blog a business blog by focusing at least part of your blog on your business services. This way, you can still communicate whatever it is you need to and make money as well.

When it comes to making money from your blog you can do so easily with these tried and true tricks of the trade. Whether you utilize Adsense, affiliate marketing, blog ads, a business blog, or a combination of all of the above, you will certainly benefit and make money. Don’t delay and start implementing these types of money making strategies in your blog today. Not only will you make money, but your blog will become more popular as well.

Blogs like all forms of writing are an art form that takes knowledge and practice to do well.

Writing…Blogs…Blogs are on-line journals where people express themselves through writing. Writing…Writing is the process where one puts down words of a language on a format that others can read. This process has not been around very long. Speaking and thinking come much easier than writing. These processes just flow out naturally like a river of consciousness; sometimes we hardly have to think about doing them. Anyone and everyone can write words down on paper but that doesn’t mean it’s ‘good writing’, myself included. Like most things in life, our society already takes writing for granted which is proving to expose more of our ignorance. Writing is a new form of expression, and if we want to do it in a way that the masses can connect with our ideas, we have to think much more simply and clearly about this art.

Now that was quite a big paragraph, you’ve got to wonder if I really needed to say as much as I just did to introduce this article on the best way to write your blogs on the Web. I didn’t even mention this main idea, and that’s what an introduction paragraph is meant to be for. This is a common mistake in many blogs out there. We try to get too many ideas across in one paragraph, sometimes even in one sentence! The key, as in all things in life-is to keep it simple. Simplicity means that readers won’t get confused about what your journal entry is actually about. Introduce your main general topic at the start, and use the subsequent paragraphs to discuss separate ideas that relate to this topic. Try to tie everything up in the concluding paragraph, your main argument and the reason why you’ve written in the first place.

Grammar and sentence construction are not easy systems to master, especially if you come from a school system that spent more time telling you about historical battles and quadratic equations than on how to read and write. This is a real problem. When we speak we can get messages across to others easily, but if we put these words down on paper, the writing just isn’t interesting and doesn’t connect with people’s curiosities and fascination. When you write you are not talking to a close friend. You can’t use slang and colloquialisms that only your local community can understand. The aim is to connect with all the people in the world, so let’s make it crystal clear and enjoyable to read.

Your computer has spelling and grammar checks, as well as access to a thesaurus. Use them, but remember that the machine can’t decipher all the intricacies of language. Language is a world in itself, and much of its territories are undiscovered by the masses. So, again keep it simple. Short, precise sentences with single ideas are great. Many words in the English language have the same meanings (synonyms). Use the thesaurus so you don’t repeat the same word over and over throughout the text. It keeps the story fresh and doesn’t turn the reader off. There’s nothing more boring than repetition. Using different words can be a lot of fun and a learning experience, just make sure you use a dictionary (also on the computer/Internet) to make absolute sure of the word’s definition.

Readability…Simplicity…Make your blog accessible by all people. You can even take into consideration that many readers will have learned English as a second language. Keep to the point-don’t go on tangents. Stick with the article’s topic, and definitely stay within the realms of your blog’s main area. If your blog is entitled “Jazz music”, people who go there don’t want to hear about how your football team won on the weekend! Please be consistent. How irritating is it to visit a blog that hasn’t been written on in months or years?

I hope these little tips will help you on your quest to producing ‘good’ writing that brings new friends and acquaintances of similar outlooks into your world. If you want people to read, the aim is to produce an emotional reaction in your reader. Pretend you are writing to another form of yourself, if it were not readable, interesting and fun…would you stick around?

Bad blogs have got to go, blogging could be really cool if done properly, maybe even with a pinch of love.’

There are a lot of blogs out there on the Web, most of which don’t entice one to go back regularly to read updates. What is missing from these on-line journals that would essentially make them ‘good’ blogs? Well, the answers in life usually come down to simplicities. So let’s look at the problem like we were children. Children don’t complicate life with miscellaneous information, and when they speak they tell you straight to the point exactly how they feel and think about a subject.

First of all, we should ask the questions,” Why do blogs exist? And what are they here for?” Well, in an ideal world ‘good’ blogs would help people connect, sharing knowledge and feelings about issues in life. As they are journals written by individuals we would hope that they’d be readable and open to comment by all other people, not just a select group of friends. The key is speaking in a way that is understandable by the masses, get rid of acronyms and local slang that only few will comprehend. Keep the sentences grammatically simple and generally short and concise.

Try to write in your blog as often as possible because if people enjoy reading your thoughts and ideas they’ll want to communicate or at least be filled in regularly on ‘your world’. Ask questions, comment on other blogs of similar content, start communities with others you’ve never met, based on your interests. Keep focused; if your blog is about thoughts on war and peace, keep your thoughts on the latest movie and how hungry you are for somewhere else. The idea is to incite intelligent communication so that in time our collective stockpile of knowledge and wisdom will gradually grow like a tree in fertile soil.

I think of most importance is the fact that you want this journal to be ‘good’ reading. Of course we all have ideas about what genres and styles we like, but writing from your heart and soul is imperative for the connection with others that you’re looking for. Share yourself; don’t hide behind walls of fear of ridicule and judgment. In real life relationships trust, respect, intimacy, and unity are all necessary for a bond to form. It’s the same in the ‘virtual’ world; people want to hear from real people-not just one-sided, highly opinionated arguments from egos that don’t want to hear the ‘other side of the coin’.

Ideas about sentence structure, grammar, paragraphing, using a thesaurus (varying terms used so as not to sound repetitive), whether or not your blog is suitable for a personal or professional approach, are all important to creating a simple and enjoyable read for the blogging visitor. If you are a beginner, please check out my next article on the basics.

Blogs might seem like an old hat at this time as by now really everyone has one . But exactly this fact is what makes them such a valuable promotion tool even for long existing websites (that are no blog and don’t have one yet): The wide and large userbase. There are thousands of bloggers around in every kind of niche that will visit every new blog they can find with great interest and thus making great new customers for your existing website. And the best thing is it doesn’t even take much work to add your own blog to your website and promote it. This article will take you through the only three steps that are needed.

1. Create Your Blog

I won’t get into the technical details of creating a blog here much. You can find more tutorials on how to set up a blog on the internet than anyone could ever need and in the end it doesn’t matter if you use WordPress, TextPattern or any other blogging software. However make sure your choice provides a RSS Feed for your articles as this will be later for promoting your blog. It also matters what you add to the layout of your blog: Since you want to use it as a promotion tool for your website you will want to include one or several prominent links to your homepage on the blog and don’t give your visitors many choices through links to other sites.

2. Write Something

This one might be the hardest part for many people, especially for those with no earlier blogging experience. However it isn’t quite as hard as it sounds: You just have to write little articles, news and thoughts about the topic of your main website(and be sure to include a link to it in everything you write!) and the more often you do this the better your blog will perform.

3. Promote The Blog

That’s easy again! The first and best thing you can do is to ping your blog. That actually means to tell all those big blog content aggregation sites out there that you have added a new article to your weblog. They will then spider it some time later and place a link to your fresh content on their site thus driving visitor to you. The best thing about pinging is that you can ping all the important blog aggregators out there at once with Pingomatic. The next step is to add your new weblog to all the RSS directories out there. Those are basically the same as normal directories, just that they index the RSS Feed and not the site itself. Google it with the term “RSS feed directories”.

After those three steps everything should start to get rolling automatically. How far it will roll however is totally tied to your content: The more often you update your blog the more success it will probably have and therefore drive more visitors to your website.

Blogging for dollars might sound like the latest game show or some new drinking game, but it’s the latest craze to hit the Internet. Bloggers began blogging for a number of reasons, but as the blog movement has increased in popularity, they have found ways to monetize their blogs and are seeing their commitment pay off.

Whether a blogger’s focus is to communicate with customers or just to have fun, they have begun looking at ways to earn revenue from their blogs. The most popular ways for bloggers to earn some added cash for their pet projects are:

1. ) Google Adsense in Blogs
Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content-relevant advertisements in blogs. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the blog, the website owner is credited for the referral. Webmasters need only to insert a Google-generated java script into the blog or blog template. Google’s spider parses the AdServing blog and serves ads that relate to the blog’s content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served.

2. ) Affiliate Programs (Product Endorsements)
Affiliate Programs work when an affiliate web site receives income for generating sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant website. Generally, bloggers will mention or endorse specific products and if site visitors purchase the product, bloggers will receive a portion of the sale.

3. ) Product Promotion
Businesses use blogs to detail how specific features or product add-ons can increase functionality and save time. Content-rich product promotion will help with search engine placement.

4.) Banner Ads
While less popular than in the past, websites with high traffic levels can still earn decent revenue by selling banner space.

As the Internet evolves bloggers will continue to seek out ways to monetize their opinions and thoughts. Daily journals and online blogs have become more than just a communication means to many.

Blogging is merely keeping of a log at a website. It is a combination of the words “Web” and “log”. Blogging is carried out through a blogging software that maintains the daily posts on the site. It doesn’t take long to set up blogs and once installed you can update it easily with lots of content daily.

To keep a blog is simply to maintain a page on your site where there can be daily posting of new content by the website owner or the visitors to the site. Blogging has one particular striking feature - the information there is always kept fresh as there are daily entries. 

My interest in blogs is in its search engine placement significance. Blogs can fetch you a lot of web traffic without any effort at all.

Search engines tend to rank sites with content favorably. Since a blog posts fresh content to the site on daily basis, the information at such a place is kept fresh and current making it a preferred destination for visitors. The web is about information - current and meaningful ones so as the information in the blog gets updated constantly with rich information so does the ranking on the search engines increase.

Some blogging tools worth looking into include:

Blogger.com - http://www.blogger.com
Blosxom - http://www.blosxom.com/

Drupal -http: drupal.org

Geeklog - http://www.geeklog.net/
Movable Type - http://www.movabletype.org/
PHPNuke - http://www.phpnuke.org/
Radio UserLand - http://radio.userland.com/
WordPress - http://wordpress.org/

Like in traditional sea, your blogging should be around a central theme or keyword. Too many themes may dilute the consistency of your content and score you down the lane of SEO. Sticking to a central theme will help you to enrich the content of your pages and get favoring scoring in the search engine ranking algorithms.

The most popular blogging tool on the market today is WordPress which can be downloaded from their website at http://wordpress.org/download. Installation is simple and does not require extensive knowledge of programming languages.

Blogging is being used by many sites as a way to passively draw targeted traffic and search engine rankings. Installing one can help you draw web traffic and get noticed quickly by the engines.

I have been a blogger since December 2007 but only began to take it seriously this year. My blogging journey began when I stumbled upon a company owned by Google named Blogger.com that offered free tools to build a website.

In fact Blogger provides you with free several templates which you can customize in addition to a domain name hosted on their server. You can host your blog on your domain if you like to. Here are some benefits I found while blogging:

1) Easy to manage. A blog can be set up by even a novice in no time. All you have to do is post and publish. Blogging can get as simple as that or even more complex.

2) Easy to update. Blogs can be updated weekly or daily instead of sometimes monthly for a static website. Even adding a few paragraphs a day can be done in no time and can be beneficial to your search rankings.

3) Get spidered quickly. Search engine spiders crawl blogs with greater frequency than static webpages. I have had webpages that took over eight months to be indexed in Google where as Yahoo sometimes index my blogs in weeks sometimes days.

4) If you write articles then you can post all of them on your blog in addition to free reprint content that is widely available everwhere. The more content you have the better.

5) You can get your website indexed quicker. An article or a piece of news about your website with an optimize anchor link will send the spiders your way in no time.

6) Sell advertising space. If you have a popular blog then you can create a revenue stream by selling ad space. Blogads is one of several places where you can sell your ad space to major companies.

7) Similar to offering ad space, you can add Adsense to your blog to monetize your content. What I love about Blogger is that once you plug in the Adsense code into your main template, a new page is created and Adsense is automatically displayed when you make a post.

Review your affiliate products. If you have a blog that is in a niche then you can find affiliate programs for that niche and do reviews of them for a commission. Every time someone purchases the product or service through your link you make money.

9) It is still early to catch on. Blogs and RSS feeds are used by the minority of internet users which makes it excellent for you to start blogging right now. Less than 10% of the Americans which is the biggest online market use this emerging trend.

10) Can be syndicated. An easy way for your readers to stay in touch with updates is to add your blog to their My Yahoo and My MSN. They can see the latest information and how long ago it was added.

11) Yes a bonus! Savvy marketers know that if you add your blogs to My Yahoo you can have it indexed in no time by Yahoo. You can use these two websites to inform blog directories that you have updated your content.

a) http://WWW.Pingomatic.com

b) http://WWW.Rssfeedpromoter.com

So with all those benefits in mind there is no reason you should not start your own blog. So when are you decide to go blogging?

What are Blogs?

Having heard the term previously but not having paid much attention most are just too afraid to show their ignorance and ask the question, what is a blog? Lets face it; the term blog does not conjure pleasant images. Blogs are web logs that are updated regularly, usually on a daily basis. They contain information related to a specific topic. In some cases blogs are used as daily diaries about people’s personal lives, political views, or even as social commentaries. The truth of the matter is that blogs can be shaped into whatever you, the author, want them to be.

Where Did Blogs Come From?
The roots of blogging can be traced back to the mid 1990’s. Who the very first blogger actually was is unclear, as the art of blogging did not really take hold until 1999. The original “weblogs” were link-driven sites with personal commentaries. The very first blogs were human guided Internet web tours. While initially thought of as diaries or online journals, blogs have evolved into the latest fresh web content.

The Future of Blogs
A buzz word in techie circles, “blogging” is the wave of the future. Whether its a fad, or proves to be a new way to communicate with existing and potential customers it deserves at the very least a cursory look.

Why is Blogging Helpful to Businesses or Individuals?
Just as animated .gifs were once cool, blogging is the trendy thing to do. That does not mean that it is not beneficial to businesses. Webmasters struggling to keep fresh, attractive content on their websites to lure visitors back, have found blogs the answer. Content is a necessity for online businesses, both for purposes of being found by search engines but also because it gives visitors a reason to come back.

Now that I have established that blogs are not only trendy but also beneficial to businesses, its important to understand how they can be used to your advantage.  I am Managing two blogs at this time. Blogging allows me the opportunity to tell potential, or existing customers blog news, updates, or generally how blogs can be used in specific situations to increase page ranking and popularity. The bottom line is I control the content. Its updated daily, which increases the chances that search engines will spider on a regular basis and it helps with page rank because it’s been submitted to all the blogging directories. Initially started on a whim I’ve found it beneficial to report tips, tricks or make visitors aware of new trends related to the blogging move. 

My blog is less formal and contains blogging tips, or promotional advice for  online marketers.  Generating a daily blog would require very little effort and would assist me in creating fresh content which my readers told me was of significant interest.

Blogs & Your Business
The bottom line is you need to determine how a blog will benefit your business, determine a schedule and adhere to it. Let your readers know what to expect and when to expect it. Blogs provide great supplemental content and direct attention to areas of your business that you want to showcase; you direct the content but let your readers guide you.

Creating a Blog
There are numerous online tools that can be used to create a blog. I found that because of security concerns, it would just be best to use a standard html program.  Its really not much more complicated than typing an email. The content is then sent via FTP to a web server. If you want to test the waters there are online web-based tool that helps you publish to the web instantly. The most popular web based tool is likely Blogger http://www.blogger.com.

Other Advantages to Blogs
While you may initially create a blog for your existing customers, you may find that you can attract new customers by illustrating your expertise in a specific field. There are numerous websites that act as “blog search engines”, be sure to submit your sites to these websites to increase your exposure. This will also help with your page rank and possibly increase the likelihood you will receive decent ranking with Google. You can also create an RSS feed in order to syndicate blog content and gain additional exposure.