Get to know other bloggers - Network yourself

Posted on April 10, 2007
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Shake Hands

If you are interested in having a successful blog and perhaps even making a little profit then you need to consider a many of the networking possibiliites that are out there. Blog communities have gotten to be pretty huge and they are only getting bigger. So search around and find one that interests you and sign up, most of them are free. I personally have been a fan of mybloglog.com for some time now due to the added benefit of tracking your blog’s traffic that it has.

You also need to consider fanning out to sites like technorati, myspace and youtube. If you don’t know what these are then you should definitely take the time to find out for the sake of your blog’s success.

Is there a Google Sandbox?

Posted on March 30, 2007
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Google Sandbox

Many people tend to mention the Google sandbox when discussing SEO or launching a web site. I’m here to tell you that there really is no consistency to this theory anymore. I have managed to get several blogs and even web site listed in Google with in weeks and in a few cases they were listed with in days! Like I have always said build your site or blog carefully and in a friendly manner and after it is well established then take the time to publish it to the search engines. Trust me they will take it from there. Of course adding a few inbound links at the same time you submit your site won’t hurt your cause either.

Blog Readers Take Heed

Posted on March 11, 2007
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Jennifer Laycock over at search engine guide made a great point yesterday in one of her posts. Can we trust the advice we get from bloggers? Unfortunately that is not as simple as a yes or no answer. Ther is a lot of grey area on this topic. As I’m sure you know by now there are about a trillion blogs on the interent these days and they all voice an opion of some sort. Even if the content is well proven or well written you must be aware of who your author is. Get to know the blogger be fore you put all of your faith into them.

Darren Rowse is a perfect example. When I started reading problogger posts I was not sure who he was or how relevant his content really was to my world. All I knew was that he is a professional blogger and everyone mentions his name at least one time on their blog. I took the time to read about Darren’s experience, research, opinions, and facts. I even emailed him and actually recieved a couple of responses. Like I said, take the time to get to know your blogger before you begin to trust their content.

New Muscle Car Blog Coming Soon!

Posted on February 20, 2007
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Muscle Cars

By demand from a few buddies of mine I have started drawing up plans for a new muscle car blog. I can gurantee that the Camaro may be featured quite a bit more than others, but what can you expect that my favorite car. The blog is going to be gearted around vintage and modern American Muscle cars.

I am not sure when this blog will get posted and linked to as it is on the back burner on my project list but just look for it sometime later this spring!

SEO and Search Engine Marketing

Posted on February 13, 2007
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Many people appear to see SEO as the chance to simply manipulate search engines so their site can rank high in the results. True that many SEOs are doing this, but they are missing a big piece of the puzzle…Marketing skills. Congratulations for getting your site in the top ten search results for Google, Yahoo, or MSN. I’m not sure if you are ready to be congratulated on your unique visitors though. You may have traffic from your rankings, but do you have a decent ROI (return on investment?)

There are hundreds of web sites that make it in to the top ten with terrible designs and even worse marketing techniques. If you haven’t heard this already allow me to be the first to tell you; rankings don’t me a thing if your vistors don’t stay! Lots of traffic does not always mean lots of conversions.

My advice is pretty simple. Do not try to manipulate the search engine spiders, just work on speaking their language. They are smarter than you think and eventually they will catch up with your tricks and believe me it will not be worth it.

Build a clean user friendly web site that meets the search engine optimization guidelines and you will surely see decent results on your ROI. It takes time to do things efficiently so have patience.

Back in the Top 10 for "John M Weaver"

Posted on January 22, 2007
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Search Engine Top 10

After adding a few new links to my blog from other blogs I have finally seen a little life in the Google Search results. My blog is bouncing around from 10th, 11th and the 12th position. I am asssuming that by eliminating all of my links to my other blogs and essentially starting fresh I have managed to get Google’s respect back a little bit. Slowly but surely! The even greater news is that Yahoo! has indexed my blog and listed it at the number one postion for the past month with out any fluctuation. It appears that Google has some filter or standard that Yahoo! doesn’t. Either way my blog is top 10 in Google and Yahoo this week.

Adsense Success on Camaro Blog

Posted on January 7, 2007
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2009 Camaro Picture

In addition to many other goals that I had in mind for my blog project I was working to prove that I could earn a bit of revenue with out having to spend a dime…just time! A fellow blogger and I had been discussing the fact that Google Adsense does not pay off as well on blogs because they have some form of a filter to know it is not an actual web site. I disagree with that completely! If a blog is built correctly and has the relevant content that a user is looking for then the pay off on ad revenue can and will be just the same as a .com would.

The total is in and this past month before being dropped by the good old crosslinking penalty my Camaro Blog earned $18.98 from Google Adsense. “If you build it CORRECTLY…they will come!”

Cross-linking research complete

Posted on December 25, 2006
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This blog has been used for one of my projects to show the cross-linking penalty can affect blogs. I developed five blogs on seperate topics and after building them up with strong relevant content, a pagerank of 2, and a few backlinks I cross-linked the life out of them. Every post had at least one link to one of the five blogs and the next thing I knew there was a big spider web. It took five weeks before Google caught on…it’s too bad because all five blogs were in the top five for major keywords in the SERPs. Thats why it’s called research.

What is my next project? Pull this blog out of the penalty and achieve top five for the search phrase “John M Weaver” again. Also see if page rank can be recieved again.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Posted on December 17, 2006
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Black Hat SEO

Many people are referring to ‘Black Hat’ SEO is the style of optimization used to cheat the system of natural search rankings. Too many links, invisible text, cloaking and so on. Just make sure you optimize your site for your user and you will be fine. Below is what wikipedia has to say about Black Hat SEO.

“Black hat” SEO are methods to try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception. This can range from text that is “hidden”, either as text colored similar to the background or in an invisible or left of visible div, or by redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly. As a general rule, a method that sends a user to a page that was different to the page the search engined ranked is Black hat. One well known example is Cloaking, the practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors.
Search engines can and do penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual review of a site.
One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.[24]. However, both companies quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list

Do you share your SEO tips?

Posted on December 13, 2006
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I read a good article the other day posted on searchengineguide.com. The article talks about being paranoid about your SEO tactics. Many people seem to belive that search engine optimization techniques are a huge secret. Sorry to say, but they really are not. You can do a Google or Yahoo search and find just about anything you want to know about the topic.

Props go to Stoney G deGeyter for this great article. If you are worried about your competitors knowing the same information that you do…quit worrying, because they more than likely already know! Stick to your game plan on developing your web site and the rest will fall in to place.

If you need some good tips to give yourself the edge visit search engine guide or also take some time to visit Darren Rowse and his team over at problogger.net.

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