There is no doubt that blogging can be a highly effective means of getting your message to your desired audience. But the challenge is to get your audience to your blog.

There are, of course, many ways of achieving this. Social bookmarking and networking, forum submissions, article marketing and many other approaches are powerful. However, good old fashioned SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) should never be ignored.

What does this mean? Put simply it means looking at your blog not as seen by a human eye but as a search engine’s robotic crawler will view it during its periodic visits. How can we do that?

I use a free tool called SEO for Firefox. As its name implies this is a plugin for the Firefox web browser. Its icon sits at the bottom right of my browser window and also in the Tools section of my top toolbar. It does many things, but for me the most valuable is its “SEO XRay”.

Open up an individual post of your blog in Firefox, click on SEO XRay and you’ll see an analysis of some key elements of that page, including what a search engine would find as its title, its description and its keywords. Unless you’ve already done what I’m about to propose, or something similar, I will guess that whilst the title will probably show as the title of your post you’ll find the description and keywords labelled “N/a” (Not available).

Now this is just not good enough. Search engines differ as to exactly how they use this information, and the importance that they give to it, but they all want to see it there. So how can we ensure that there’s something there, relevant to each individual page on your blog? It is, of course, very easy to go into the theme editor of a WordPress blog and add description and keyword content there. That will be better than nothing but the problem is that they will come up exactly the same for every post, and that is unlikely to be what you want as you deal with many different aspects of your blog’s subject area.

Enter Platinum SEO Pack. This is a plugin for WordPress blogs that allows you to specify what you want to appear in the SEO-critical fields. I’m not going to go into detail here on how it is set up or even the full range of its functionality. Go, get it, install it on one of your blogs, and see the difference. By the way, it works on WordPress blog pages as well as posts.

(Incidentally, the links above to Platinum SEO Pack and SEO for Firefox are non-commercial. I get no financial reward if you decide to use these utilities. This post is meant solely as helpful information).

I have to confess that I have not yet done what is advocated in my title.  I ought to do so, and have been reminded about it by an excellent blog post entitled “Year in Review Article Template” by Chris Knight of EzineArticles.com.

To supplement that article I looked around on the web and found a few different examples of recent Year in Review writing.  Here are four, including a narrative report, a video review, a simple list and even a spreadsheet format. Between them they may give some ideas.

Commercial Open Source Blog: Another Year in Review

Commercial Open Source blog few days ago has completed another year of life, a good excuse to make another write-up about the past year. Over 300 posts covered many open source related to.

Wrecked Magazine – A Drifting Magazine featuring Formula D, D1GP …

Scion Racing 2009 Year in Review. The 2009 Scion Racing team video has quite a few drifting highlights from their respected stars Ken Gushi and Tanner Foust. The video is mixed with some other Scion assets but the bulk of the video …

Josh Ellingson Illustrator – Battle Damage – 2009 Year in Review

2009 Year in Review. Holy smokes, it’s almost 2010! It’s been a very interesting year, and about a million things happened. Here’s a meager rundown of all the trouble I got into this past year: My artwork went to SPACE! …

Data Breaches in 2009 – a year in review | Assassin's Blog

Announced Where the Data Breach Occurred Details of Breach Amount of Stolen Records October 28, 2009 Bank of New York Mellon Corp.

What will my own review look like? Watch this space!

Hello,

Knowing that you’re probably very busy I won’t take much of your time. but I do want to tell you about a new, free keyword research tool that Brad Callen has just released.

It’s called “PPC Web Spy“, and it allows you to browse Google and view the Adwords keywords of ANY Adwords advertiser!  Basically, it’s a small file that gets installed into your Firefox web browser.

When you do a Google search, the software automatically places a “view keywords” button below every single Adwords advertiser.  When you click this “view keywords” button a neat popup window appears that not only shows you the keywords that any Adwords advertiser is bidding on, but it also shows you a LOT of other information, like how much they’re paying per click and so on.

I’ve been testing it out on some of my most-used keywords. It’s quite amazing and should be a powerful addition to the toolkit of many of our members here, even if you don’t advertise with Adwords but just want to use it to find good keywords and phrases.

Anyway, here is the link where you can download the keyword research software, and it doesn’t cost anything.

I hope you’re having a great day and that this will make it even better.

- David Murray -
AdMastery.biz

P.S. Once again, here’s the link where you can get the free keyword tool.