Common Blogging Mistakes

What's in a Name?

I am currently on a little golfing vacation and this time I brought along the old laptop in order to catch up on a backlog of emails I've received. My golfing really sucks but I have managed to put a good dint in my "to do" email list. While answering your questions and reviewing the blogs my readers have asked me to look at I have compiled a small list of things that many of you are a bit confused about.

The number one question is always about traffic. Why aren't you getting any? Let me sum this up with one question. When you started your blogs who were you hoping to attract? Let me put it this way. You start a blog about the trials and tribulations of making money online as a work at home mom and call your blog "My Life Online". (I made that up) The problem with this is that there is no way the search engines can categorize your site for your niche. Your blog title is the primary keyword(s) used by the search engines in deciding what your blog is about. Next in importance is your blog description and then comes your post title and finally your header titles.

Sure you can call your blog "My Life Online" or "Bob's Blog" and still get relevant traffic if you keep using your primary keywords throughout the rest of your pages but this is making things a lot harder than it has to be. Google will figure out what you are about eventually but you will find it hard getting to the top of the rankings if your primary keyword isn't in your Title. Yes, John Chow dot Com made it to number one for the term "Make Money Online" but this is the exception rather than the rule and he did it by garnering an insane amount of backlinks optimized for his keywords. He also went too far and got himself Google bombed right off the front page in the end but that is another story. Make it easy for the search engines... use your main keyword in your blog title.

If available you should also try and include your main keyword in your URL as well or some variation of it.

The bots that crawl your pages start at the top left corner and work down to the bottom right. Do not put anything irrelevant in the top left portion of your page as this is what is used to categorize your page for both indexing and adsense ads. Let me explain this further as it is very important and even experienced marketers don't seem to understand this.

Google will index your page using your blog title followed by the first line of html text it sees. Make sure the first line of text is your page title. Make sure your page title contains the keyword you are trying to get traffic for. Make sure your page title is alluring enough to get people to visit as this is what they are presented in the SERP's. (Search Engine Results Pages) This may seem obvious to you but I have critiqued a number of blogs lately that have started their posts with sentences like "Thank you for coming to my site" or "Welcome to my blog" or "Part 2 in my continuing journey online". This is what gets indexed and people searching on the engines are not likely to click on these sites as they won't have a clue as to what these sites are about.

Your page Title and post title specifically is what Google uses to send you relevant adsense ads. If your blog is about cats and you use a post title like "Why dogs suck and cats don't" you will get ads for dogs, cats and pets in general. This might be fine but if your readers are cat lovers you wont get the best ads available. The more you optimize your post title and post content the more Google optimizes the ads it sends you. I want to explain this in further detail as a lot of people don't understand adsense at all.

Let's say you start a blog called "Cats" and your first post is titled "Why I love Cats". Wonderful. Your post rambles on about all the reasons you love cats. So far you have told Google exactly what your blog is about and that your post is most likely about four legged cute little furry hairballs and not about a Broadway musical. You will get indexed for cats. You might get some traffic but not much. You will get adsense ads for cat related products... perhaps even for tickets to a musical. The problem is that your ads will be low paying and your traffic will be browsers - people out for a sunday drive. Why? You are far too general in content and this is not how to attract readers or how to get the best paying adsense ads.

You can use the blog title "Cats" but your post title must zero in on something specific about cats and then your post should expand on this theme. Try "Common Cat Diseases and Treatments" or "How to Maintain a Healthy Cat". By doing this you will draw a targeted audience and moreover you will get better targeted ads... ads that pay more and are more likely to be clicked on. Most marketers don't realize that Google rewards good quality sites with the best ads and sends low paying ads to poor content sites. The more optimized your posts are the more optimized your ads will be.

The ads on this blog average about 35 cents a click and often produce 50 cents a click. I have even had $1 a click days but this is usually when a beginner starts using adwords and bids way to high on keywords. They don't last long and learn an expensive lesson. Most of the marketers I know in the "make money online" racket are getting 3 cent clicks and the reason is simple. Home page optimization. Huh?

Your home page gets the bulk of your traffic. This is true for everyone and it tends to have the highest page rank. A blogs home page is different than a website's home page. Bloggers tend to post several posts on their home pages usually in snippet form with a link to the full article on a separate page. This looks good and gives the reader lots stuff to read. All in all this has become the norm for blogging and I don't disagree with the practice at all. I don't do it though and this is why. The majority of ads clicked are on the home page and not on secondary pages. Why. People reading further into your blog have found what they are looking for and aren't clicking on ads. People on your homepage have not found what they wanted and click your ads in hopes of better luck elsewhere. Blogs that use several posts on their homepage aren't optimized for adsense - too many subjects and post titles - the content is varied because the page contains several different subjects and the Google bot doesn't know what the page is about specifically. The end result is that the page will receive general ads based on the overall content of the blog and this means low paying ads.

I only post one article per page including the home page. Each page is optimized around one subject and Google sends me the most relevant ads which also pay the most. The downside of this is that I don't get as many page views as regular bloggers but I do make more money from adsense. If you are skeptical just test this on your own blog. This blog makes an average of $8.83 a day with adsense and that is way more than most blogs. I have had a number of people ask me why I only use 1 post on my front page and this is why. It pays better.

Ok.. there was more I wanted to yak about but I tee off in half an hour so maybe I will just post this and pick up again next time.

Cheers,

Grizzly