Hostway Newsletter | Hostway Web Solutions


ISSUE 62		DECEMBER 2006

Dear Valued Customer,

A blog can boost search engine rankings, attract repeat website visitors and engage your customers in a conversation. But many of us have yet to jump on the blogging bandwagon. Why not make a New Year's resolution to create or enhance your blog in 2007? In this month's newsletter, you'll find tons of tips to help you maximize your blog's ROI.

Make Your Blog a Search Engine Superstar

Blogs can add a natural boost to your organic search engine ranking because they are frequently updated, chock-full-of-links, content-rich sites that search engine spiders love crawling. While blogs instinctively fit with search engines, there are always steps you can take to improve your ranking. Check out these 10 tips for making your blog a search engine superstar.

1. Choose descriptive titles.
Make sure your blog has a noteworthy title. Search engines give headlines more importance than body text, so use targeted keyword phrases to describe the topic you are writing about. A good title not only helps your search engine ranking, it gives your readers more clarity about your subject matter.

2. Emphasize the right things.
Reinforce the same targeted keywords and phrases you used in your title throughout your writing to establish the relevance of your article to the title.

3. Use your keywords in text links for ALL inbound and outbound links.
Whether your links are internal or external, text links rather than graphic links will improve your score with search engine spiders. Also try to include your best keywords in the link text that navigates to pages optimized for those keywords.

4. Use your keywords in the page's title tag.
Always include your keywords in each of your page's title tags. Try to make your keyword or key phrase the first word of the title. Each page of your site should have its own title tag, with its own keyword.

5. Put your keywords in your description tag.
Try to include your keywords or phrases in the description tags of your pages once or twice-but no more than that, or you could be accused of spamming the search engine.

6. Place your keywords in a keyword tag.
Even though many of the major search engines, such as Google, no longer look at the keyword tag, some small, specialized engines consider the keyword tag additional relevant text on your page. Include your most important keyword for the page first. Then add a few related keywords or phrases.

7. Make sure you use your keywords in heading tags.
In HTML, “H” tags are for headers. They range in size from H1 (the largest) to H6 (the smallest) all “H” tags are given more weight than regular text when determining relevance. Bigger “H” sizes count more than smaller ones so don't miss out on this keyword treasure trove.

8. Put your keywords in bold text in several places on the page.
Bold text is given more weight than regular text by search engines, so put your keywords into a boldface phrase once or twice on the page.

9. Use your keywords in text early and often.
Regular text is usually enclosed in a body tag or a paragraph tag within the body tag. Use your keywords once or twice in the first sentence of text. A good rule of thumb is to repeat the keyword two to three times in each paragraph.

10. Use your keywords in alt tags.
Include your keywords in alt tags for every image on your website. Alt tags display text when you move your mouse over an image. This text also is read in speech synthesizers for the blind.

By taking a few moments to incorporate these tips into your regular posts, you will soon be blogging your way to the top of the search engine results.

New 6-Page Mobile Business SiteBuilder

Now it's easy to get your complete website onto mobile devices everywhere! Hostway's new Mobile Business SiteBuilder lets you create six customized, .mobi-compliant Web pages with images. Anyone can follow the Mobile Business SiteBuilder's quick, step-by-step process regardless of Web design experience.

What Would You Like to Learn More About?

Is there a trend, service or product you'd like to learn more about? Email us at editor@hostway.com, and we'll try to include it in a future issue of the Hostway customer newsletter.

Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

To give your blog the greatest possible readership, you can submit it to search engines in addition to promoting it on your website. Some good blog search engines include: blogsearchengine.com and blogdigger.com.

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Will Mokry
Advertising Art Director
www.austinwomanmagazine.com

The Hostway community is brimming with talented individuals running smart online businesses. We're proud of our customers, and we'd like to thank you for your business by featuring you in our next newsletter! We'd love to hear about your online achievements and share them with more than 100,000 of your Hostway peers. Just send your story and a link to your website to editor@hostway.com. We can't wait to hear from you!

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