Internet Business Toolbox» Internet

Keyword – Internet Biz Toolbox

sugeng — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:50:50 +0000

Two days ago I checked out Google with keyword: Internet Biz Toolbox and scroll through the search pages. I was amazed to see that this domain www.biz-toolbox.com was ranked 45. Today when I checked the same keyword again, I found www.biz-toolbox.com was ranked 24. This was really a remarkable half-way jump within two days. This is a good result although I have expected it to rank higher at Internet Business Toolbox.

I did not do anything unsual. I just followed some common sense advices from AtomicBlogging V3.0 by Alvin Phang. Some of the points are to include keywords in your post title, to include your keywords in the first paragraph of your post, to create category with your keywords and to tag the post with your keywords.

The AtomicBlogging eBook is very easy to follow with step by step instructions. Search engine optimized themes are also included so that the learning curve for people setting up a blog the first time is very much reduced.

The book started by explaining what mistakes should be avoided and what should be done instead to create powerful blog. It then continued to discuss the five steps blogging traffic blueprint. I noticed the book is focusing a lot on traffic generation for the blog along the way which is very useful for new bloggers. The book continued with tips on finding hot profitable niche to setup your blog.

Alvin then procced to outline step-by-step how to setup the blog from selecting and registering domain names, setting up domain name server, installing Atomic Blogging Wordpress and installing the theme and plugins. This is the technical part explained in layman English.

The interesting content comes in from chapter five when he touches upon optimizing your blog for peak performance with powerful SEO secrets. He also discusses on optimum method to write and compile articles for your blog. Then comes the exciting part on monetization of the blogs various advertising types.

Although I was not a newbie in blogging having started few blogs in the past and stopped half-way through, I found that AtomicBlogging is useful in providing correct methodology and basic concepts so that the blogs are optimized and ready to generate more traffic and eventually more prosperity to everyone.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization

sugeng — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:36:24 +0000

SEO is very commonly heard when we talk about internet marketing. Search engine optimization refers to the process of improving volume and quality of traffic visiting a website from search engines. This type of traffic is achieved through the normal search results of the search engine. It is also called organic or algorithmic traffic. Optimization part of SEO refers to the efforts done by webmasters to improve the ranking of the search engine results with the understanding that sites with higher ranking will receive more visitors and consequently more profitable.

Search engine optimization considers how search engines work and how people search. SEO tries to achieve the best search engine result by editing the content and html codes so that search engines will rank the page higher based on the selected keywords and tags. There are many optimization methods discovered and devised by the SEO experts. In parallel, the search engines are also forever adjusting and optimizing the search criteria to better serve the searching community who is the search engine’s customers. To have better understanding of search engine algorithm, here is the link to download Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. Google also has a very informative page on Search Engine Optimization.

[Added on 14 April 2009]

SEO Technique

SEO is not an easy process. It involves many tedious tasks. The simplest among all is to focus on certain related keywords on your page. You need to include the keywords in the title, the first few paragraphs and also on the meta tag of the article.

Another popular topic on SEO is the page ranking on the search engines organic search results. Organic here means that the search result is displayed by the search engine based on the ranking determined by the predefined algorithm. It is not something that is purchased.

Hyperlink analysis is also covered in SEO. It involves the analysis of the links from and to the particular page. Some factors considered are the relevancy of the links and the quality of the pages linked. It is worth paying attention not to link to pages considered as link spam sites and also link farm sites.

Most search engines are using crawlers to index the sites. Crawlers refer to automatic programs sent by search engines to search for new sites and index the pages. There are certain criteria used the search engines to index the pages as not all pages will be indexed with the same weight.

White Hat vs Black Hat

There are generally two categories of SEO techniques. White hat refers to techniques recommended by search engines as part of good design. Black hat refers to techniques the search engines do not approve. White hat confirms to the search engines guidelines, involves no deception and tend to produce long-term results and effects. Black hat will eventually be discovered by the search engines and either banned temporarily or permanents by the search engines when they are discovered.

White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines. It helps to make content that is easily accessible to the spiders, not trying to trick the algorithm of the search engines. White hat SEO is in many ways similar or even close to web development that promotes accessibility.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. There are many methods which are best not mentioned here. When you think that your content and page structure do not look normal, it is high chance that you might have inadvertently employed black hat techniques. Either you modify your content and structure or risk being banned by the search engines. I guess the answer is very obvious here.

[/Added 14 April 2009]

In Conclusion

It is a good idea to use tools to do search engine optimization.There are many freely available tools on the internet. Here are four sites that provide optimization tools. SEO Tools provides many useful tools and tutorials for your SEO needs. Using the tools provided you can optimize your keywords based on search analytics, link analysis and ranking checkers. If you are the techie type, SEO Chat provides a very comprehensive list of tools that include everything related to adsense, Alexa, meta, robots and many other things. 136 SEO Tools as the name implies has a collection of 136 SEO tools. SEOToolSet has a collection of useful tools including SEO toolbar and other tools.

Additionally, Ultimate SEO Tool by Googleranking provides analysis of your frequently used keywords against Google rankings. You will be able to see how you fare based on Google search criteria. Another useful tool is SEO Tool by SEOBugs. It provides analysis on various aspects of your website based on certain criterias and also provides suggestions on how to better improve the SEO.

While everyone focuses a lot on how to do SEO correctly, we also need to be aware of what not to do. This article on Top 10 SEO Mistakes offers a very intuitive insight on common sense things that we need to avoid. Most of the time people just rush through to produce articles especially in blogoshpere when consistency in timing for in article production is a constant weekly if not daily pressure. Bloggers just forget about the quality and commit most of the mistakes producing adverse effect on the search engine optimization.

The best SEO tip I can offer here is just to avoid all the mistakes presented in the article. By doing this, you are already half-way through to win the race to the top of search engine organic or natural search results.

Good luck to your SEO effort. You are always welcome to share your best tips and sites on this topic.

What is Blogging?

sugeng — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:15:37 +0000

Let’s start by defining blogging by explaining the meaning of blog. In the early internet time, the term blog was known as web log. In simple term it means record of things kept on the web. It means log in web format, hence web log. Along the way, the term gets shortened to blog. So, what is blogging? It is an act of creating post for and maintaining the blog. Blogging is just like keeping a diary (log) online.

The world of blogging is also called blogosphere. This is referring to the world of blogs with all the contents.

Nowadays many blogs are started everyday. According to Technorati statistics done in 2007, there were about 120,000 blogs created every day. Those were about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. When translated to posts, there were about 1.5 million postings per day, which meant that 17 new posts were created every second then. Compared to mainstream media, blogs are getting more and more popular. In fact, blogs have become alternative for people researching for news, information and data over the internet.

Looking from language perspective, we can see an interesting trend from Sifry’s Alerts written by David Sifry (founder and CEO of Technorati). In 2006, Japanese has taken over English as the most popular language used in the Blogosphere followed by Chinese and Italian at third and fourth place.

How to start blogging? It is very easy to start a blog nowadays. You have a choice of doing it on free blog hosting like blogger, wordpress, typepad, etc. Alternatively, you can also choose to host your blog yourself. For this, you just need to have a domain name and a web hosting. The most popular application for blog self-hosting is wordpress which is included in popular web hosting packages.

Once your blog is up, you can start blogging. You can start writing and posting the posts according to the area you would like to focus on. For business purpose, the blog should contain updates to the business, new offers and even valuable reports for your target markets. For personal, it can contain anything you would like to have and to write.

When you have enough content, you can start to think of monetization for your blog. Monetization means thinking of ways to make money blogging, making money from your blog.

[Added on 7 April 2009]
From the outlook, blogging seems to be very easy to start. However, it really requires strong determination from the blogger. At least for the start, it is recommended to have a minimum of three postings per week. It is better if you can write a quality posting a day. This is the only requirement for the start to be successful. [/add]

I have gone through this path of self-discovery on blogging. It was fun but required much effort and energy until I found out lately about Atomic Blogging version 3.0. It is a complete step-by-step tutorial guide on creating profitable blog. It is suitable for beginner and intermediate bloggers to start profitable blogging. It includes eBook, search-engine-optimized templates and useful plugins. I like everything with exception of one thing. I realized English is not Alvin Phang’s first language and I found out there are just too many things I would need to edit and correct if I were the editor of the eBook.

You can watch a short video clips on the Atomic Blogging version 3.0 below.

Welcome to Internet Business Toolbox

sugeng — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:23:25 +0000

Internet has become an indispensable tool in today’s live. It is even more so for business. Started as a form of having fun and communication among the scholars, nowadays internet is an essential tool in daily business operations.

There are so many things we can do over the internet. There are many tools developed by people both for fun and for commercial use. There are also unending streams of new tools being rolled out day in day out. With so many tools available online, it makes sense to have a toolbox. Who has all the time to try and use all the tools out there? This is where a toolbox will come in handy.

Internet Business Toolbox is a geared towards reviewing and exploring available and newly launch online tools for businesses. The toolbox will be a collection of the most useful, cost effective, convenient and easy-to-use tools for business.

The blog started as a personal interest in order to keep myself updated of the changes and development in the fast-advancing internet world. Doing business over the internet has become easier and more convenient compared to just a few years ago. It has also become more and more cost-effective. It means that you can achieve more with lesser expenditure. In terms of bottom line, it means better profitability. The cost of doing business over the internet utilizing available tools have come down tremendously.

Business people are busy with running the business. They may not have the time and resource to keep track of fast-pace changes in the internet. This is also true even for online businesses. In fact, business people should spend time running the business productively rather than worrying about the tools to use online. Therefore, I hope this blog will be able to fill the gap and become a complementary resource to successful business people running the business.

To get regular update on Internet Business Toolbox, please click this link.

Please also feel free to leave comment for improvements and suggestions. I am looking forward to forging mutual