Today, Blog has become an essential element of Social Media Marketing for Internet Marketers. If you have decided to have a blog, I would highly recommend you to have a self hosted word press blog. Word press blog is recommended as it is an open source like Twitter and has very cool customizable plugins implemented that can enhance the functionality of your blog.

Last week, I happened to attend a training call by Raymond and Ferny, authors of SEONetworker. Raymond and Ferny are rocket scientists ( believe me they are) who figured out google seduction formula to make google generate FREE leads for you. This training call was very valuable and I had learnt a lot of SEO tips from these guys. In this post, I want to share with you some basic search engine optimization strategies I learnt and could be implemented in your word press blog Administration panel. Also, we will discuss some offline SEO strategies that will increase the visibility of your blog to search engines.

Inline SEO Strategies
As a blogger and internet marketer, you have to make sure to set a few basic options in your word press administration panel for SEO purposes.
Perma Links
Permalinks formats URL for the post. There are lot of options provided in your blog’s administration panel that are cryptic and is not readable. I would highly recommend you not to use the default one but to use the custom structure and make the URL of the post either same as the title of the post or with main keyword phrase relevant to the post . This would make your post more readable and more appealing for the search engines.

Meta Tags
It is really amazing that many internet marketers miss using meta title, description and tags. These are the standard fields for any website and are used by search engines like Google to understand your website. Please take some time and fill these fields with relevant information about your website.

I would highly recommend you to use All in One SEO Plugin which is completely free and can be installed for your Wordpress Blog. This plugin allows you to fill the title, description and keywords for each post that can be used for SEO purposes.

Content Organization
It pays very well to organize content on your website for SEO as well as a visitor. Make maximum use of wordpress pages on your blog to organize your content. For example, you could have a separate page for your primary business opportunity and category tags that you use for the page is MyPrimaryBusinessOpportunity. You could generate traffic for this page alone in word press blog using the various marketing strategies and SEO.

Off Line SEO Strategies
You can generate more traffic to your word press blog by using these simple offline marketing strategies.
Directory Submission
Directory submissions increases your visibility to the blog. The most popular ones are
Yahoo Directory
DMOZ
Botw
gimpsy.com
searchsight.com

Most of the directiories mentioned above do a great job for a yearly subscription. some websites do have a free website submission but would take quite some time ( 6 months)to approve. I would highly recommend you to not submit your blog to these directories unless you are very clear about the usage of the blog.

Ping your Blog
The most easiest way to increase the visibility of your blog is to use FREE ping services such as FeedShark , Pingomatic and ping various services about your blog once you have written a post.

BackLinks
Search engines like Google rates your blog based on the backlinks received from various other sites. It is good to get links to your blog home page. However, Google rates deep links higher( links directly to your post. For example – look at the URL for this post) higher than that of the home page. There are several effective ways to generate backlinks to your post.
1. Make an article out of your post, reference back to the post in the author’s box using anchor links and submit to the article directories. But, make sure you create article variations before submitting to various article directories so that search engines like Google don’t think that you have created duplicate content. I personally use a fantastic tool Automatic Article Submitter for creating variations of the articles and for submitting articles to around 300 article directories in a seamless and automated way.
2. Make a short youtube video on the content described in the post and refer back to the post in the video description for more information. Then, use Mass Video Distribution tool to publish your video to various video sites, Blog sites and podcasts. video is a great way of marketing and you will be generating a lot of backlinks to your post.
3. Do mass social book marking of your post using tools like social poster or onlywire
4. Broadcast the blog post to your email list.
5. Publish the links to your post in social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc.

All the strategies described above will be effective only if you are able to generate quality content consistently. If you can create content on your blog very often and generate back links as described in the post, Google will consider you as an expert and will generate tons of FREE Leads for your business.

Wishing you all the best and I will see you at TOP

PS: Last week, Raymond and Ferny hosted a free webinar discussing some amazing SEO Strategies. It is very nice of them to give away the recorded version of webinar for FREE. I picked up a lot of valuable nuggets for positioning my blog and I would higly recommend you to listen to the recorded version of webinar if you are serious about positioning your business online.

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