A lot of people are blogging these days for business. They might be using their blog as a means of establishing a web presence, and it’s a great free way to do that. Or they may be using their blog as a marketing tool, advertising sales, specials, new products and services and the like. Many people also sell products or services directly from their blogs too. So blogging can be an important and beneficial tool for almost any business.

No matter what your business-related reason for blogging, good SEO is essential for your blog, just as it is for any other website. And one thing you can do to help improve your blog’s SEO is to add meta tags to the Template. If you aren’t sure how to do that, here are some simple directions for doing so.

NOTE: The content editor in this WordPress site tends to alter things in HTML code and they don’t display correctly on the page. This generally affects apostrophes and quotation marks. When you copy the code below, please retype the apostrophes and quotation marks yourself, before pasting the code in your Blogger template. Otherwise, it may not work. And be sure to work in a plain text document, rather than a word processor like Word or Works, etc. Those programs also tend to reformat HTML code.

1. Login to your account at Blogger.
2. Click on Layout, and then click on Edit HTML.
3. Search for the following bit of code, which will likely be near the top of the template.

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

4.  Directly underneath that bit of code, paste the following code:

<meta content=’PUT DESCRIPTION HERE’ name=”description”/>
<meta content=’PUT KEYWORDS HERE’ name=”keywords”/>
<meta content=’PUT AUTHOR NAME HERE’ name=”author”/>

Be sure to replace the content for your Description, Keywords, and Author Name, where indicated. And don’t forget to save  your changes.

I just read an article that I thought I would share with you. The content describes how Google is doing away with Page Rank from Webmaster Tools. For anyone interested, follow the link below for more information.

So Long Google Page Rank

For those of you who are confused by what “Page Rank” means, I have found a great website that explains it quite well. It should help take a bit of the mystery out of it, for anyone who is scratching their head on the subject.

I just found two great online tools that can help you make some SEO improvements to your website. And by doing that, you’re increasing your site’s potential for increased traffic. So take a peek and see if these tools can help you and your website.

This website will crawl your site from the search engine spider’s point of view. It will give you all sorts of great information, suggestions, and an overall score for your website.

This website tool will analyze and grade the marketing effectiveness of your website, based on things like traffic, SEO, popularity, and other technical factors. It will also give you advice for making improvements.

So go ahead and check them out. Now’s a great time to tune up your website!

Many people do not understand much about Google, the Search Engines in general, or Search Engine Optimization. One particular area of confusion tends to be with Google’s Page Rank system. So I thought I’d give you the in-a-nutshell explanation of what Google’s Page Rank is.

Basically, a Google Page Rank is the numeric value assigned to a web page (1-10), based in large part on the quality and number of backlinks pointing to particular page. In other words, when another person puts a link to your website on their website, they’re creating a backlink (a link back) to your website, and that, in essence, counts as a “vote” for your site on Google.

However, it’s important to note that it’s not the quantity of backlinks that is most important to Google. Rather, it’s the quality and relevance of the backlink that really matters. In order for a backlink to help your site earn a “vote,” it must be coming from a website that has content that is relevant to your own. So say for example that you sell dolls and stitcheries on your site, and there is a website selling beauty products that has added a link on their site to yours. That backlink will not help you with Google, because the content of each website is totally different (i.e. irrelevant).

It’s also important to be aware that when you link to other sites, the relevance rule applies even more. If you link to a site with irrelevant content…and worse yet, one that has a low page rank itself, it can penalize your site with Google for doing so. And these are reasons why we need to care about our page ranks…because they can penalize our websites, which can cause lower results for our sites in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages).

There are other things that factor into Google’s Page Rank system, and you can find lots of information about that on the web. But Google doesn’t ever reveal ALL of its exact or specific criterion for determining page ranks. We know some things, as mentioned, but we can’t know all. But it’s good to pay attention to the factors that we do know about and can control, so that we can achieve the best page rank possible on each of our website’s pages.

Jacki of Hearthside Collection wanted to know how important internal site links are, and whether button links or text links are better on a website.

It is VERY important to have internal links on your site; these are the most important kind to have. And they should be text links whenever possible. The search engine spiders that crawl your site cannot “read” the text on images, and even though they can read image file names, they are not as good for your site with regard to search engine optimization as text links are. Text links provide you with an excellent opportunity to repeat your meta keywords, which are very important to repeat throughout the content of your site’s pages. So if, for example, you are using button links instead of text links for your categories, you are eliminating the use of those keywords by doing so, because your category links should always contain your keywords anyway.

With regard to how your site looks to customers, and specifically how the button links look, are they more aesthetically pleasing? Maybe. But ask yourself two questions: 1) Would you NOT shop at a site just because it didn’t have button links? 2) How many button links do you see on top website shopping sites like Amazon, Wal Mart, Buy.com, and others? Of course you want your site to look visually pleasing to your human visitors, but this should never be at the expense of the spiders and bots that crawl your site and index its pages in the SE’s–which is where the bulk of your web traffic should be coming from. I encourage everyone to eliminate the use of button links on their website in any instance where keywords should be present. If you want to use buttons for things like an Email link or a Guestbook, or something like that, that’s fine. And by all means have a creative logo and webtopper to give your site visual appeal. But always use text links instead of button links when keywords can be used to your advantage.

Sheila of Faded But Desired Treasures asked what is the most important thing an online business owner should do on a daily or weekly business.

In my opinion, the most important things you should do weekly include the following items:

Monitor your traffic (I highly recommend Google Analytics for this purpose). See where your traffic is coming from, what keywords were used to bring that traffic, what pages they viewed, how long they stayed, etc. GA can tell you all of this and more. Pay special attention to traffic that is being generated by your paid advertisements; if the ads are not generating decent traffic, then don’t renew those ads when they expire!

Check your site for broken links, errors, and omissions. We all overlook little errors here and there, but if we stay on top of them and check often, we should be able to keep these to a minimum.

Seek out new methods of marketing and promotion. It really does pay to advertise, and many online retailers (newbies especially) overlook or underestimate the importance of this task. Marketing should always be of utmost concern! And always be sure that you are advertising on relevant sites. See the Online Business Junction Link Building Page for more info on this topic.

And as an additional note, on a monthly basis, I recommend the following:

Add at least one new product to your site. I add at least one every single month on my retail site, and all new products appear on my What’s New page at Pip Berry Place, and I have all new products set to display for 30 days. This ensures that each month if/when return customers visit, there is always something new for them to see on the site. And having them all on one page makes it very easy for customers to find all the latest additions, without having to hunt for them.

Add new content to your home page and elsewhere on the site whenever possible. When the search engines crawl your site, they are in looking for many things, including new content. So it’s always a good idea to add new products, articles, perhaps a freebie here and there, etc so that you always have new content on your site.

The best thing you can if you’re trying to do SEO yourself and you aren’t very “techie” is to read and learn as much as you can about it. If you’re trying to build and grow your website, this is just a must to help you reach your goals of success. I have lots of information about SEO on Primitive Business Junction. And I have posted many links there to other sites that offer even more info, for all skill levels, to help people understand SEO. You really owe it to yourself and your website to learn as much as you can, so that’s really the best advice I can give on this topic.

As for WordPress vs. Blogger, I’d say that’s really a matter of personal choice. If you’re comfortable with Blogger, there is no need to switch. I use Blogger for 3 of my blogs. But I am building a new online marketplace on a WordPress integrated site, and I must say that Blogger is much more user-friendly. I like WordPress and its features, but I don’t think I’ll be switching my Blogger blogs over any time soon. But with regard to the indexing of blog pages by the search engines (Blogger vs. WordPress), I don’t think there’s an easy way to compare crawl rates on one vs. the other. All of the SE’s are going to crawl sites most efficiently that have been appropriately optimized, that are updated frequently, regularly pinged (in the case of blogs), that have a good internal link structure, sitemaps and robots.txt files, and that have good server speeds. Any website or blog that meets these criteria has the best chance of getting crawled and indexed in the most timely and efficient manner.

To truly test your site’s spot in Google’s index, you need to do a Google search using your site’s primary meta keywords. I have a country primitive marketplace, for example, and my primary meta keywords are “country primitive marketplace.” So to test my spot in Google’s index, I need to type country primitive marketplace into Google’s query box to get an accurate measure of where my site resides in Google’s index. Fortunately, when I test my site, it comes up in the number two spot; not too shabby after only seven months on the Web. I know of quite a few country primitive marketplaces that have been open far longer than mine that don’t even show up in the first 3 pages of the results. So I’m pleased with where my site stands right now. But I will continuously work to improve my site’s results using any of my keywords.

You can test your site’s placement in Google using any of your meta keywords; start with the primary/most important keywords first, and then try your other keywords. Wherever you find your site lacking in Google’s results, you know these are the words you need to focus on as you optimize your site for the search engines.

1. With image links, any surfer who is browsing the web with a text only browser, or with images disabled, and there are many who do this, they will not be able to see your links if you use buttons. This is why Alt image attributes should be used with images, but since many people don’t realize they need to use alt tags, then this presents a problem for those surfing the Web without being able to view images.
2. Even if you use image links with alt image attributes, these carry less weight and relevance with the search engines than simple text links do.
3. Images require time to load, and the more images you have, the longer it can take–and image links are no exception to this. For those surfers still on dialup–a number that would likely surprise you–waiting for a page full of images to load can be frustrating enough to make them leave a website.
4. Many button images use fonts that are difficult to read.
5. Text links can be “read” by the spiders and bots crawling your site.
6. If you’re using keywords for text links, you’re doing more to optimize your site for the spiders and bots, and increasing your position in the indexes of the various search engines by doing so…because keyword-rich content is very important to the search engines.

While button image links are more aesthetically pleasing, they simply aren’t recommended if you’re concerned with your site’s SEO. And really, why do you need to have cute button links anyway? If you already have other graphics on your site, such as a logo and/or a webtopper and backgrounds, there is already plenty of eye candy available. And with the text links in place, you can contribute to your site’s SEO, and put your focus on providing quality products, and a website that is easy to navigate for all.