SEO For The Common Webmaster

Remember those long rides as a kid where you were in hurry to get somewhere? Maybe it was a special trip to Grandma’s house, an amusement park, a vacation. As kids we always asked, ” are we there yet”?  As a blogger and webmaster, I am always thinking about this question and I am sure many of you are too. We build, we design, we do SEO, and we promote. Why do we do it? Though almost of all of us wish to make money from our blogs, this is a more personal question that only you as a blog o0r website owner can answer.

I have known and worked with many webmasters who start one project after another and they put almost nothing in it with dreams of getting rich. Does this happen? More times than not, it does not. There are those few who have conquered the dream but it took hard work, endless hours, and a good investment to achieve. I have been part of many Online projects and made some money here and there. Did I get rich? Not yet. However, I have not invested my whole life to my Online projects.

As webmasters, we need to look at what motivates us and why we do what we do. Only have we do this, can we honestly answer the question “are we there yet?” I know the answer for me changes as my life changes.

When most of my money comes from offline work, I am where I want to be with my blogs. They have held through the test of time and they are always there waiting for me when I need them. They generate enough income to pay for their cost and they supply a value to the readers.  These are the best of times!

However, when my offline income is low, I go back to the love of the blogs and realize that the journey is far from over. It is in those moments that I know that the real answer is to enjoy the adventure on the way and not be an hurry to get there. Building a blog or website takes work and time and if you always try to improve, you are never truly there. However, if your love is to share your knowledge, maybe you have already completed the journey.

So with that I ask you, Are you there yet?

The following post is a sponsored review.

Blogging is tons of fun and it can be a great pastime. People create blogs for various reasons. Some create blogs as a business venture and to create an income. This is great and can create a nice part-time income. However, some people just want a blog to have fun and update friends and family or to socialize. That is where free blog sites come in the picture.

We all know about the most common ones like Blogger and WordPress which offer free blogs to users. However, many casual blogger do not realize that there are more options out there. Thoughts.com is one of those options. This site is pretty cool and offers many cool features to add fun and excitement to your blogging experience.

The first time I heard about this site, I thought it was just another free blog site. However, once I ventured into their community, I was surprised at the warm community feeling that it gives off. They allow video uploading, picture uploading, and unlimited bandwidth. This is great to have a free blog that allows these features without having to find a separate host for the pictures and videos. They even host your podcasts and have easy to integrate features to share all of them on your blog.

If you are a novice or a longtime blogger, there is something in this community to attract and keep you coming back. The add a-friend features almost gives it a Facebook like feel.

I suggest you visit thoughts.com and check out what they have to offer and be sure to take a tour to see some of the fine features. Get blogging within minutes and you will be hooked for life!

Ranking in the major search engines especially Google takes a lot of time and effort to achieve the right SEO results. There are many factors that play roles in optimizing your site for search engines. The major factor in SEO is link building.

There are several ways to build links pointing to your site. Many new webmasters choice the easiest route which is to just haphazardly place links on all over the Internet anywhere they can get a link. They also fall for link exchange schemes that are suppose to drive tons of targeted traffic to their website. This method will help bring a little traffic but it does very little to build solid organic traffic from the search engines and it does very little to move your site up in the search engine rankings.

The key is to build solid one way links that are from quality sites that are related to your niche or topic. These type of links take more work to find but will provide you long term results. Link building is not an overnight venture and a webmaster should be prepared for a lot of work to optimize their link building to achieve the results they want for their site. SEO work in general is not easy and it is an ongoing process.

Luckily, for those webmasters who are short on time, there are quality link building services that offer SEO services to help webmasters get the most bang for their buck. These types of services offer link building through commenting, in content links, blog roll links, and various other places on sites relevant to the webmaster’s niche. It is always better to hire out the service than to spend hours of your time if you have no idea what you are doing.

Link building is the most important factor is SEO. If your car broke down and you were not a mechanic, would you try to repair the car? If you have no idea how to optimize your website for the best results, hire an expert to do it. If you have the ability and know how, by all means, do the work yourself. However, if you lack the time and/or the skill to do a quality job, hire a reliable link building service to achieve the results for you.

I love blogging and I started this blog to share what I have learned with other webmasters and webmaster wannabes. I wanted to share an article I wrote a few months ago on one of my other blogs. It is a guide for new bloggers to get started. My Basic Guide for New Bloggers offers an overview of the process needed for new bloggers. It is simple and easy to read and will help anyone get a blog up and running.

One of major points when it comes to blogging is that you will always learn and you will be always adding cool new things to your blog. Some work and some don’t. It is all about the experience and fun when it comes to blogging.

If you do not have a blog, jump on board and start one today. I am here to help if I can so please feel free to drop a comment if there is something I can help with.

Well it seems that another update has just been released by the creators of WordPress. Information regarding the update can be found on their blog. It seem that they are ahead of schedule and have made some new features.

I just did the upgrade for all my blogs and to be all honest, I have not found anything that just jumped out as all the new. However, the claims are that it fixed many bugs and there are some cool new features. Maybe I will see them as I need them.

For those of you who are planning to upgrade, I recommend one of two ways. The first way is the easiest but you had to have installed you blog through Fantastico which is a software installer available with many hosting accounts. All you have to do is go to the Fantastico page on your cpanel and hit upgrade and it does the whole thing for you.

If you transferred your blog or installed it yourself without the use of Fantastico, there is a easy to use plugin for WordPress that does the upgrading for you. This plugin is called WordPress Automatic Upgrade and it is easy to use and saves you the possibility of messing something up.  I use it on this blog and it has worked great for the last two updates.

Of course, you can also do it manually and the instrutions are located here. This is not hard but I prefer the easy methods I described above. Upgrades can be a pain but they did fix a lot of bugs so I highly recommend you upgrade whenever a new version comes out. Please feel free to share any new features you discovered with the update by leaving a comment here.