Blog Ranking

Here are the 7 steps to optimizing your blog:

You can try this in 2 different ways; either on a new blog, or by modifying a blog you have already written.

Start with the blog keywords you are going to use.
You will need 3 free tools to make this work:

GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOL at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

KEYWORD BUZZ at:
http://www.imbuzzcreators.com/freesoftware.html

DUPE FREE PRO at:
http://www.dupefreepro.com/

Step 1:
go to Google keyword tool.
(Bookmark page into your browser under favorites as you will want to return each time you write a new blog.)

When you enter a keyword, you may enter several words or phrases related to the subject matter you want to write about, and the tool will return a list of related terms and phrases, as well as the results for your primary search terms.

When the tool returns with the list:

Pick keywords
The Keyword Tool will return a list containing short bar graphs showing you the latest info on your search terms as well as a list of related keywords.

The first bar graph on the line indicates the advertiser competition. If the bar is all or nearly all green, forget using the keyword because the competition will cover you up, and the search engines will never find you. What you are searching for here is a keyword that has very little, or NO advertiser competition.

The easiest way to find a term with little competition is to use 'long-tail keywords'. To give an example, the term 'depression' has a LOT of advertiser competition, but a long tail phrase like 'tips to overcome depression' has very little.

Moving to the right on your Keyword Tool you will see 2 more bar graphs. These indicate the search volume for the last 2 months respectively. In an ideal Keyword search, your best keyword would have NO advertiser competition, and the search volume would be enormous! However, it rarely happens that way. If there is a huge search volume, there will be huge advertiser competition to go with it. So you need the Keyword Buzz tool to tell you just how many searches there were on the three major search engines; Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

When you find the keywords that match the criteria you need, (you may have to dig a while, depending on how popular the subject you wish to write about) you can use the "Add" feature located to the far right of each keyword. This will create a list for you in the upper right hand corner of the page.
Note: Do not forget to save keywords as txt file on your desktop before you close your search tool.

Step 2
The Keyword Buzz Tool
Open keyword buzz, and enter keyword list. You can start with a main keyword, and then click 'add more keywords' to enter your whole list.

Then click 'Gather Data'. Keyword buzz will then go to work and search all 3 of the biggest search engines for your terms and will bring back the number of searches on each SE for the last month. This is sometimes surprising. A keyword that does not show a very high search volume on Google will sometimes have a MUCH higher search volume on Yahoo or MSN. If you only relied on the Google data, you could miss several thousand searchers.

Once again, you will want to go down through the list of terms and pick keywords with the most searches. Ideally you will probably want to keep your list of primary keywords to one or two as far as keyword density is concerned, but including all of the keywords in your article won't hurt anything, as long as you can work them in without detracting from the 'readability' of your blog.

Step 3
Apply keywords to blog
In text (bold) when you write your blog, type your highest value keywords in bold text. Search engine spiders love this for some reason.
In title (main keyword) and of course, you will want to have your main keyword/s in your blog title. This is one of the ways the SE will judge the relevancy of your article.

Step 4
Keyword density
Keyword Density is another way that Google judges the relevancy of your article, not only to the title, but also to the keyword or search term. Several years ago, all you had to do to be found was include your keyword 97 times, or at least more times than your competition.
However, of course, the gooroo's sold this 'secret' so many times its usage became a plague on the web. This angered many people, Google included. The most popular search terms, such as 'golf' or 'free' were being included in sites that had nothing whatsoever to do with golf, just because that term got millions of hits.
Eventually keyword relevancy became a major issue.
There are 2 things to remember about relevancy. 1. Keep your keyword density (how many times it appears in the content) somewhere between 2 - 5%, and 2. Include your main keyword/s in the title of the article/blog.
This is where Dupe Free Pro comes in handy. Dupe Free Pro has a number of handy features that are invaluable for blogging. Not only does it let you rewrite an article while avoiding the duplicate content issue, it also allows you to check your keyword density, look for duplicate content on the web to see if someone has been copying your material, and it will even let you check for words related to your content!

Once you have written your article in Word, Word perfect, or notepad, and saved a copy to your computer, open Dupe Free Pro and paste a copy into the left-hand window.

Now enter your keyword or keyword phrase in the little window beneath your article and click the "Calculate Keyword Density" button. For instance, everything in this article prior to this sentence has a keyword density of 4.072% for the term 'keyword'. Therefore, if I wanted searchers to find this article by the search term 'keyword' I would be right in that perfect range! However, if I wanted the searchers for the term 'blogging' to find it, I would be out of luck as 'blogging' only has a Keyword Density of 0.189%.

Therefore, you will want to tweak your article until your main keyword density is between 2% - 5%.
(also, note that if you want to post the article on multiple blog sites, but avoid being penalized for duplicate content, you can paste another copy of the same article in the second window, and then start rephrasing and rewriting copy number two until your duplicate content is under 75%. You can determine this by clicking the 'Compare' button. The percentage of duplicate content will show in the little box at the bottom center.)

Step 5: Social Book marking

Once you have your blog up and posted, you can start on the final steps to getting it popularized and getting your traffic. I have started getting traffic from digg in a couple of ways. First, of course, you have to submit the article. Then if you have a friends list on digg, send them a shout about the article.
There are some people who spend all their time on digg, and if you can get them into your friends list, and digging the articles you submit, your hits at your blog will continue to increase. Of course, the best way to do this is to digg their articles, as most of them will return the favor.

To Date, most of my SB efforts have been concentrated at digg. However, this is where your own testing comes in. you should do your own testing to find which site is the most productive for you.

Here are a few ideas:
http://hub.com
http://del.ici.ous.com
http://furl.com
http://twitter.com
http://technorati.com
any more you can find

Step 6: Ping your blog.

Pinging is simply a way to let the various blog services know about your blog. It is very easy and quick to do. Simply go to one of the various ping services, (I have listed a couple below) and enter your information, check the services you want to ping ( I always check 'ALL') and hit the button!
http://pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/

NOTE: do not ping a blog unless it has been updated. Multiple pings on the same blog can and will get you ‘blacklisted’!

Step 7

This is the last and final step. You may or may not want to use this step, although I think it is worth the extra time and trouble. I have included this because I know some of you will have a blog at WordPress, and some one else may want to start one.
One of the things you need to know about is underground link building. It is one of the so-called "Dark Arts" of creating traffic, and WP has a unique feature that makes it easy!

Simply write a post at your WordPress account, and before you hit the 'publish' button, note that at the bottom of the editing page is a little bar that says: “send pings to---”. Click on the plus sign and it opens to a box that will allow you to enter multiple URL's of the various blogs you want to ping.

What this does, is send a comment link to the blog you have entered. Right above is an area to include an optional excerpt. You can enter whatever you like, such as "Thanks for the info", or "Great blog!", or whatever. The purpose here is to create links from other blogs back to yours.

There are a couple of ways to locate relevant blogs to send pings to. One is the WP 'tag surfer' option you will find in your WP dashboard, or you can use 'BlogBuzz' which you can download from the http://www.imbuzzcreators.com/freesoftware.html site. Both let you search for blogs related to your own based on your primary keyword.

Note: it is probably best to send no more than 20 pings per day, starting with the highest page ranking on down, in order to appear natural. If a blog shows up with a thousand back links the first day, Google might become a TAD suspicious, and Sandbox you for being a spammer!!