How To Optimize Your Blog For Search Engines

Many clients ask me how to drive more traffic to their blogs. By now you have probably heard that blogs are an excellent resource to get leads as well as clients for your business. The best way to do that is by creating search engine friendly blog posts that get indexed in search engines. When people search for information on topics you discuss in your blog it appears on the search engine result pages. Potential customers then are able to read what you have to say and get on your mailing list.

So now it all boils down to techniques that help you effectively optimize your blog for search engines. Here are tips and ideas to do just that:

- Create A Keyword Rich Header For Your Blog. The header repeats on all pages on the blog. By making sure that your header contains targeted keywords, you are able to get more of your blog pages indexed in search engines.

- Treat Each Blog Post As A Separate, Optimizable Page. Use the process of search engine optimization on each blog post. This means that you need to create an optimized title for each post, find targeted keywords for each post and weave the keywords into your post's text.

- Make Sure That Each Blog Post's File Name Are Descriptive. Different blogging software behaves differently, but some will call your blog posts 2.html, 3.html, 4.html, etc. As you can see, that is not very descriptive and not particularly helpful to either people or search engines. When you create a post called "How Coaching Helps Business Owners", calling it "how-coaching-helps-business-owners.html" is a much better title than "5.html"

Make sure that your blogging software creates descriptive file names for your blog posts; it is better both for human readers and search engine spiders.

- Get Links Pointing To Your Blog. Quality links to your blog means more blog visitors and higher search engine rankings. Current search engine algorithms value links to your blog, which means that having links pointing to your blog will improve your blog's search engine rankings.

- Get Your Blog Listed in Blog Directories. Blog directories are a great source of getting unidirectional links to your blog. Since blog directory links many times are unidirectional (they link to you, but you don't link back to them), they are great for boosting your search engine rankings. Having many unidirectional links pointing to your web site will improve your search engine rankings.

A blog is an excellent marketing tool, but your blog will not attract more leads and clients for your business if you don't use search engine optimization techniques to optimize your blog and attract targeted search engine traffic to it.

Saving Money on All Aspects

In this economy it is essential for everyone to watch every penny we spend and save as much as we can on all the items we need for our home and family. The day of the coupon has returned, both online and printable coupons are saving families thousands of dollars a year on every day items.

Most big-name grocery stores have those coupon boxes by select items throughout the store to save instantly even if you normally don't use coupons. Coupon trading websites have opened where people can trade their unneeded coupons for those that they will use. Just about every online store has either a coupon or discount that is available for customers, with offers such as free shipping or percent-off with a minimum purchase. Some incentive websites will offer discounts and coupons if you sign up to be a free member of their site.

Without a good line of credit, some corporations can not complete their overall business goals. It is advised to look at charge cards as a utility and tool, not the enemy. Treated properly a good charge card would be a life safer and prove to be one of the most valuable assets to both community and big businesses alike. It can be easy to get carried away with credit but used wisely it is perfect,

While the sale of newspapers is down the sale of Sunday newspapers is up because of those who clip coupons. The memories of mom sitting on Sunday afternoon clipping coupons has become common once again. Some refuse to use coupons, saying it is too much of a hassle. However, if you look at your total at the bottom of your receipt and it shows how many dollars you have saved by using coupons you too will become a believer. For some families it means the difference between feeding the family for a week or just a few days. That is what I would consider food for thought. Now where did I put those scissors at?

Filters Make Your Voice Smooth As Butter

Your speaking voice is one of the biggest assets you have when developing an online business. It's true. There are a number of different applications where you can use your voice to enhance your online presence and your business model. In particular, you can use your voice to record podcasts, add audio messages to your website and create audio information products.

Modern technology has made the recording of your voice very easy indeed. You can download a free version of the Audacity software and purchase a microphone and quickly record digital audio files with whatever spoken message you like. This article will discuss a few techniques you should use to make those spoken messages smoother and buttery, just like those radio announcers.

The first thing you need to do is purchase a pop filter. Pop filters eliminate the plosives in your speech like P's, B's and D's. All three of these tend to pop into the microphone, thereby popping into the ears of listeners as well. Pops can be extremely distracting when listening to an audio recording and can even discourage your audience from listening to any more of it. A simple $10 pop filter looks like a big foam rubber cover for your microphone and it can eliminate the distracting plosives quickly and easily.

Next, it's time to start recording. And after your recording is complete, there are three electronic effects you can use to make your voice sound all milky like the radio announcers. The most effective one is called the compressor. It compresses the dynamic range of your audio file so that the loud parts are softer while keeping the volume of the softer parts the same. The net result is that you voice sounds smoother to the audience.

I usually lower the pitch slightly as well. On Audacity, you have four ways to specify the change you want: musical note, semitone, frequency or percentage. I only lower it by half a semitone which works out to a 2.87% drop in my voice pitch so it's a small change but I think my voice sounds better afterwards. You can play around with this to see what pitch suits your voice best.

The last effect I use is the bass boost. Predictably, it amplifies the bass frequencies of the audio file. Now, it does NOT lower the pitch of the file. It only amplifies the bass frequencies while leaving the treble frequencies unchanged. This effect rounds out the bottom and takes the tin out of the recording. Sometimes, my voice can sound tinny and shallow. The bass boost eliminates that and leaves my voice sounding like honey,

At the time of this writing, my audio files have been downloaded over 17,000 times in 27 countries. I don't use these effects to completely alter my voice. If you listened to my recordings, it sounds just like me. But the effects I've described above make it incredibly smooth and pleasing to the ear, allowing the listener to absorb the content rather than being distracted by a poor voice quality.