If we go back and remember the early days of blogging, web logs were primarily considered as online journals which we could share with our friends. It has come a long way today, but it has essentially retained the classic layout that still fits the original purpose – sequential posts with the most recent on top in a wide column, and a narrower column or two for navigation. Of course, this simple layout will not work with all types of content, and if your needs are more specialized than what the typical blogging platform can offer, you may want to consider using Expression Engine.

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Optimizing their site is quite a challenge for most small business owners. More often than not, they find it quite an overwhelming task. If you are one of the many such website owners, here is a brief sum up of what you can do to improvise upon your site.

Most search engines nowadays tend to browse through the actual content of the page being searched for, instead of sticking to the tags. Offer quality content on your website, for that is what attracts traffic. More traffic translates to a more popular website. The mantra is that you can never have too much of relevant content. Keep updating the content. Old content did no one any good. The search engines actually look into how old your content is. Fresh rank ensures a higher priority and therefore, higher ranking.

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Sometimes, what’s important is not what you do, but how you do it, and SquareSpace V5 is the perfect example of this philosophy. It’s by far the most polished-looking blogging platform I’ve seen, with a dashboard designed to let you blog in style. Kevin Rose of Digg described it as “like Typepad and Wordpress on crack,” and after seeing what SquareSpace can do, I’d have to agree.

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One important thing to consider if you’d like to blog professionally is the platform you’ll use. There are many free and paid options out there, but for a number of years now, WordPress has been the platform of choice for professional bloggers. Six Apart is trying to change that with the recent release of it’s very own Movable Type Pro, which mixes blogging, content management and social networking. And did I mention that it’s free?

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There’s one thing you must admit if you want to have a stickier blog or site: most people don’t have the patience to read large blocks of text.

Pay attention to your own online reading habits. How do you react when you see long paragraphs? Don’t you feel discouraged to read on? Don’t you prefer reading shorter paragraphs? Even if you do feel comfortable reading long blocks of text, keep in mind that you’re the exception. The general Internet audience has different tastes. And in order to succeed as a webmaster or blogger, you must take into consideration the browsing and reading preferences of your visitors.

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It may sound like a phrase taken out of Stephen Hawking’s books, but “infinite space” on the web is simply defined as “very large numbers of links that usually provide little or no new content for Googlebot to index.” Needless to say, it’s a bad thing, and can lead to bandwidth congestion issues, or worse – Googlebot may not be able to index your site’s content completely.

A good example are calendars, which usually have a “Next Month” link. Since time is (almost) infinite, it’s possible to crawl through these links successively, onto a faraway future date, without much usuable content getting indexed. In effect, the search spider got trapped in “infinite space” instead of getting on to index your other content-filled pages. Now, Googlebot is smart, but apparently not smart enough just yet. It can figure out some of these types of URLs on its own, but it has its limits, and therefore needs human intervention some of the time.

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Preserving your site or blog’s credibility is much easier than you may think. I’m going to illustrate this with two personal examples:

1. After writing my recent article on StumbleUpon traffic, I took the time to review it and compare it to the sources of information it was based on. I thanked myself for doing this: I quickly spotted some inaccuracies in my post. All I had to do afterwards was to correct the wrong bits of info, rebuild some sentences and add a few others. Of course, I took these simples measures before hitting the “publish” button. Then I reread everything again and compared the fixed article to my sources one more time. I only published the post after making sure that there wasn’t a single piece of info in it that I couldn’t claim to be true to the best of my knowledge.

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Not long after Wordpress 2.6 came out, the talk of version 2.7 going public either in late September or early October has surfaced. For bloggers, it can be a challenge to keep up with this pace, and sometimes it just boils down to appreciation of the new features.

Here are the proposed changes for Wordpress 2.7 taken from the WP Codex. Of course, we’ll have to wait for the final release to know which among these actually got in, but by just looking at this list, do you think it’s worth the trouble to upgrade? Or rather, what would it take to get you to upgrade your current Wordpress installation?

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You may be saying now: “Of course it’s SEO! There’s no such thing as SEOProc.”

Are you sure?

I’m going to show you that while most webmasters dream of reaching the SEO King/Queen status, many of them are in fact moving towards SEOProc stardom.

See if you recognise any — or all — of the following symptoms:

1. Spending time in SEO forums and blogs is essential. You read as many posts and comments as possible, trying to distinguish valid pieces of information from the useless ones. Eventually, you get confused and tired… and move on to the next forums and blogs.

2. Split testing is important because it helps you detect SEO techniques that truly work. For several times you’ve been about to run your own tests. But then you say to yourself: “Why would I want to do this anyway? There are already so many SEO specialists doing this. I’d better wait until they publish their own tests’ results.” And this is exactly what you decide to do.

3. Keyword researching is an absolute must-do for all webmasters. With this fact in mind, you research keywords all the time. You hardly — if ever — put your research’s resulting data in use, but that really doesn’t matter. At least you’ve taken the first and most important step in your SEO strategy and this is what counts.

4. Installing SEO plugins on a WordPress blog is easy. You often find posts listing such plugins. You love reading and bookmarking those articles. After all, by reading them you’ll be able to choose the right SEO plugin… someday. There’s no hurry; new plugins are released all the time and you prefer waiting for the perfect one.

If you relate to the list above in any way, beware: Search Engine Optimisation Procrastination — aka SEOProc — will hinder you from achieving web success. Unless you stop procrastinating and start taking action now.

Can you think of any other SEOP symptoms? Share them by leaving a comment.

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We all need web hosting whether our sites makes $100,000/day or $0/month, however, we don’t always have to pay full price for it. Now I know there are several hosting companies offering such low hosting plans that some people might feel that it doesn’t matter if they pay or not but I will assume you are not one of those people since you have continued to read past the title of this article .

A common misconception with hosting companies is that they will only offer deals and discounts on their small hosting plans, this is not true. Hosting companies are in business to make money just as most of us are and they weight the Pros and Cons of business arrangements just as we do. If something makes sense to them then there is a high chance that they will do it whether it be a budget hosting plan or a top notch dedicated server.

How does this work? Well, it is very simple really, all you need to do is contact your web hosting provider, try to speak with the person in charge of business development or billing and let them know that you are currently hosted with them and would like to know if they would be interested in a barter arrangement where you add “Your Site Name hosted by Your Host Name” with a link to their website on all pages of your website.

This can be a very attractive offer to a host since a referral from a website that is currently being hosted by the hosting company is far more convincing than many of the alternatives such as searching through web hosting directories or using search engines. If you have loyal followers of your site then the “hosted by” message becomes even more powerful as a means to provide additional business to your host.

Have a few bits of information on hand when calling your host:

• Prepare a brief summary of your website and its audience. Make this as short as possible and keep it in a regular conversational tone.
• Have your traffic stats ready as this is one of the main things your host will be interested in find out to help determine if the deal will make sense for them or not.
• Know your Google PageRank. Your host may be interested in knowing this to help determine the reputation of your site.

If your host seems a bit reluctant to go ahead with your offer you can suggest a trial period during which they can track the results and see if the deal will infact be beneficial to them.

As simple as this strategy seems the beautiful thing is, it works! So give it a shot and let it work for you. Good luck!

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