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Our team sits down with a client because they want to grow their business. We look at their site and quickly pick apart some of the strategies their former consultant implemented, like "hidden keywords" in the footer or hiding text within the index page. These strategies may work, (temporarily) but are considered "Black Hat SEO" by many experts. Google doesn’t look kindly at these strategies and within their Terms of Service, your site can be de-indexed and cost you thousands or millions of dollars a year.One of the easiest, simplest, safest white hat strategies is implementing a blog to your business. Now, there are several ways to do this and the question often comes up, should we implement a "stand-alone" blog with its own domain name and build a business around the blog or should we implement the blog within our site, like we’ve done here at Donzos.com/blog. There is no easy answer to this question, but the key is that either way will drive traffic to your business.

How to Start Your Own Blog.

Blogs get picked up quickly by the major search engines for two main reasons….. and the two keys to SEO.

1. Content - Google and other search engines love ‘em because it’s fresh, unique content uploaded on a frequent basis. (We recommend to have at least one post per day to keep the readers and spider bots coming back on a regular basis)

2. Links - If you are providing some valuable, good content, you’ll get nonreciprocal inbound links from other bloggers, and Google will continue to love your blog in a way that’s oh, so nice. Picking the Right Blog Software or Platform is critical if you want any success with blogging. Generally, you have several options to choose from, but for discussion of this post, I’ll limit our discussion to the three platforms below.

1. Blogger In early 2003 Google acquired blogger as their own blogging platform/software. While the platform is extremely easy to use, the major problem from an SEO perspective is that all of the blogs are hosted on Google’s host. So, even if you were to implement the latest SEO strategies on your blog …..www.whatever.blogspot.com….it won’t be the optimal platform for your business. In other words, essentially, you’ll be helping Google’s Blogger program. Sure, you can sprinkle your blog with links to your "money sites" or business links, but again, its like fighting with one hand behind your back.

2. Wordpress (two versions) Wordpress is a great platform and has two versions and both are free. The first version is when you go to: www.wordpress.org and sign up with an account. There you’ll setup a free account and choose your domain name and set up your blog. The problem is similar to blogger. Your domain name will look like this: http://whatever.wordpress.com/ The key here is to use wordpress software and place it on your own server so the domain looks this. http://www.whatever.com This is the best deal of all because it gives you all the benefits of the wordpress software, and drives traffic to your site. Wordpress also has a tremendous development support with free widgets which allow you to enhance your site with free features and plugins. You can also completely customize your site to your needs.

3. Movable Type This is a paid software that you install on your own domain name. It works just like the self-hosted option of wordpress above. I have friends who love the program and the ease of software. Our team recommends using the self-hosted wordpress with a customized theme. Watch for more videos on how to setup your own self-hosted wordpress blog.

In this video, Mark Archer, founder of donzos.com shows his readers how they can easilty write their content within their blogs.  Mark is using Wordpress version 2.3.1 with a Semiologic theme version 5.0.  (a not so subtle affiliate link is below) http://www.getsemiologic.com?aff=donzos  Mark Briefly describes tagging, and the differences between a post and a page. Also, keep in mind that the demo Mark is using is a stand-alone blog. If you have a blog as a subdirectory of your main site (ie. www.domain.com/blog) then you’re defaulted login would be (www.domain.com/blog/wp-admin) Enjoy the video.

What is SEO?

SEO is the short form for Search Engine Optimization. To define it more clearly, SEO is a set of practices that yield better rankings for a website on the search engine results page. Over the last few years, SEO has become almost a norm for any business website that indulges in any form of Internet marketing.

Search engines are an important source of looking for relevant information on the web for more than 80% users. Chances are that you and I have at various points logged on to any of the major search engines to recover information from the Internet. Whether it is a product, we are looking for or news or even advice, we tend to rely very heavily on search engines. This makes SEO a must for website developers.

When you enter a set of keywords into the search box, the engine parses through a set of pages it has already indexed by relevance to yield a result. The results page is a long list of websites that are likely to contain what the user requires. If your website matches a user’s requirement you would ideally like it to feature somewhere prominently on the list but this is not obvious. With millions of pages on the Internet being dedicated to similar products and information it is hard to get a top ranking. SEO practices can actually help you get on top consciously.

Under the wide banner of SEO come specific practices like keyword optimization, meta-tags, site submissions, and link exchanges among others. By following these methods, you can create sites that are indexed as highly relevant by search engine crawlers and therefore increase the organic ranking of the site.