This is a clear example of why you need to have your main keywords as part of your domain name. A lot of the major web directories are still human edited (or at least human approved) and they will not allow words or promotional text that is not a part of your domain name.

If you already have a blog using your own name or a non-keyword name, there’s nothing much you can do about it. However if you’re starting a new blog, it’s really worth the money to get a proper domain name. Read my post about getting premium domain names as a guide to snap up great domains at cheap prices.

Although there are many directories around, some of the best like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory are out of reach for most people. DMOZ is basically defunct and the only way to get in right now is if you know an insider. Yahoo asks you to pay them more than $290 for non-refundable “consideration” fees. That don;st leave you with much options does it?

Best of The Web is a directory that has been around since 1996 – that’s a like half a century in Internet speed. It’s probably one of the last few “old school” web directories left that you can still make use of. The original directory now accepts submissions for websites only, so all blog submissions will end up in the BOTW blog directory.

How much does it cost?

For $99.95 a year or $299.95 one time fee, it’s still cheaper than Yahoo’s no-guarantee submission fees.

However, submission to BOTW is not the magic pill you’ve been promised. It will only count for a small part of your entire SEO campaign. You should also consider also using tools like 1WayLinks, 3WayLinks or other useful linking methods.

As far as link building is concerned, article marketing has always been one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways of doing it. On ProfitBlogger I already covered Article Marketing Automation, 1 Way Links, 3 Way Links, FirePow and other useful tools for submitting articles via “blog networks”. Now lets take a look at traditional article marketing, which has been around for much, much longer.

With traditional article marketing there are a few key differences:

1. Your articles will be published on sites with higher authority and ranking, for example EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com
2. You cannot get a way with writing crappy articles, since most sites worth submitting to will manually approve your articles
3. Instead of creating hyperlinks within the article content, you will only get a link back to your site in your author “resource box”

For niche blogging sites, article marketing has always worked beautifully and will always continue to do so. Article marketing by itself will not get you much direct traffic, but regularly submitting articles over time will get you indirect traffic from pretty awesome search engine rankings.

One software that I have used over the years is Submit Your Article by Steve Shaw. It’s one of the most advanced article submission programs around, with two unique features:

• Article Leverage – When you enter an article, you’ll be asked to enter many variations for individual sentences and the article title. When your articles are submitted to traditional article marketing sites, each site gets a unique version of your article.
• Article Trickle – Your articles are submitted slowly, so you get a more natural effect over time. Articles are queued and submitted automatically without your involvement.

Recently, Submit Your Article has changed it’s features drastically. Instead of limiting your articles to 8 / month, you can now submit an unlimited amount of articles. At just $37 month it’s definitely one of the tools you’ll want to have in your Internet marketing arsenal.

When you publish an article using the system, it gets published on:

• The SYA article directory itself, giving you an instant link back
• Popular article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, IdeaMarketers and more
• Article submission groups that accept email submissions
• Sites that syndicate content from the above mentioned article directories and groups

One article can get you at least 100-200 links back to your site. Plus, since SYA allows you to create unique variations, it helps to avoid the duplicate content penalty as as a result you get more valid links that are recognized by Google as being “unique”.

Info / Signup : Submit Your Article.

Looking for a WordPress blog host? I’m sure there are tons of alternatives out there, each with a more confusing pricing scheme that the other, each offering you what seems to be something truly unique but in reality is the same old shit.

With Host Commando however, we are aiming to be the best blog web hosting service ever.

Unlike other blog hosting packages, Host Commando really gives you everything you need to start your first WordPress blog in record time:

1. Blog web hosting at competitive rates
2. Free WordPress blog installation & setup
3. Free Search Engine Optimization service
4. Free access to a massive collection of WordPress themes
5. Free “Blogging for Profits” guide
6. Free web marketing software and tools
7. Much more to come soon..

The Premium Blog Web Hosting plan is the best deal for new bloggers, but existing bloggers can also try the Basic Blog Web Hosting plan which is a cheaper “self-help” option.

A lot of our subscribers have been asking us to install and optimize WordPress for them, and Host Commando offers just that with their blog web hosting plans. Just fill up a simple form, and we do the rest.

Today, we shall deal with one of the most important concerns of a blogger – Optimization of a blog. This is a a tricky process and often involves spending long working hours on the blogs. It has given a lot of bloggers several sleepless nights, testing ad units and their placements and finding an appropriate network to get on board. Boosting your profits can be simple if you are a keen observer and can interpret and match the layout of your blog with a great theme. Having your own winning formula apart from the money you make from your content consistently includes ad placement skill, use of  plug-ins, choice of colors, text, etc. which can make a big difference.

Let us focus on few requirements which can shape your idea to fit into the frame of profit making business.

Suggested Plug-ins

It is strongly recommended to spend some time making your website appear distinguished, particularly if your aim is to eventually decrease the bounce rate. Plug-ins for the Wordpress play a great role in helping you out with this.

There are a lot of plugins which bloggers use to get the best out of a blog. We shall check out 5 of the must have plugins to help you run a blog at ease. Some of the plug-ins are especially useful in reducing your ‘hand-work’ to the bare minimum and makes managing your Wordpress blog easy.

1. All in One (SEO) – By far the most widely used plugin to get that search engine optimization you always wanted. The pack allows you to specify the title, description and keywords for your blog and individual posts.
2. Akismet – Spams are a blog’s worst enemy! This plug-in comes with a standard installation of Wordpress and virtually eliminates spam comments, reducing your burden to mark them as spam manually.
3. Related Posts – A major problem a blogger faces is to dig through old posts that are related and manually link them in the new post. This problem is solved with Related posts which inserts relevant posts automatically.
4. Wordpress Database Backup - Backing up your blog is crucial and this plug-in allows you to back up everything in no time.
5. Top Commentators - It lists the visitors who have commented for most number of times on your blog, hence showcasing their name on your blog. You may find a lot of commentators returning back seeing their name in the list! It also adds value to your blog to help new visitors to stay longer to dig into your blog’s content.

Positioning of Advertisements

Perhaps one of the most common mistake that a newbie blogger makes is with the positioning of advertisement itself. The theory is pretty simple – if you have the capability to analyze where people actually look while exploring your blog, you have solved half of your query.

When you look at the front page of blogs like that of ProBlogger Darren, you will notice that only a part of the page is displayed and to see everything on the page you need to scroll down. The elements of a website below the fold are seen by significantly less readers than elements above the fold resulting in lower conversion of ads.

The content of your blog is another place where most of your readers are drawn to. Different bloggers have different opinions on the positioning of the ads between the posts. Say - Engadget places a rectangle AdSense unit between the second and third posts on the front page. The Movie Blog uses a rectangle ad directly under titles and aligned left on individual pages. Practically, there is not just one thumb rule. You need to experiment to find what works best for you. Your ads are often accepted differently by different visitors

All in all, you need the best optimization to unleash the profit potential lurking in your blogs. Convert your blog into a cash-cow with mantras like ads placement, software store commissions, your own products, your affiliate program etc. Opt for a good color combination if you’re getting your blog designed. Alternatively, you may intelligently choose a free theme or one of those paid themes like Thesis.

Image credits: Jose U

At our new Profit Web Directory, you can submit your websites and blogs starting at just $1.00 each for a basic listing, with up to 3 deep links at an additional $1 per link. I’m offering links at such a low price because I want to populate the directory with a sizeable amount of inventory before increasing the price permanently.

If you want to be among the top 10 on the homepage or category pages however, you’ll need to enter a higher bid. Being in the top 10 will definitely get you better link juice and traffic, but even the basic $1 link is good enough for most cases.

Getting one-way, non-reciprocal links to your blog is the best way to improve your search engine rankings. Besides this directory, I also recommend you use 1-way Links and 3-Way Links to get more sites linking back to you.

Submit here: Profit Web Directory

In the next video I’ll show you how to write “spin-able” content easily before submitting your article to directories.

You can read more about the JetSubmitter article marketing service here. Signup for free here, make sure you take the auto-account creation special offer.

Google recently published a better, more comprehensive document on SEO or Search Engine Optimization. While the simple report doesn’t contain anything more than what you may already know about SEO, it is definitely better than the very vague guidelines they used to reference!

Download It Here.

I highly recommend you take a look at it, both to refresh your memory and to distinguish all the wrong and contradictory SEO advice you may find out there. Make your blog better, apply some of these SEO techniques if you’re not already doing it.

If you’re using WordPress, the good news is even the default installation is already quite search-engine friendly. Still, there are a few tweaks you can do to get better search engine results.

You may have come across the idea of using PLR or Private Label Right articles. What this means is that you get ready-made article content to use in any way you want and it’s 100% yours. Most good PLR sites including PLR Product Reviews, PL Rights, PLR Gold and PLR Health Wizard can give you tons of content for a very low price.

If you use these PLR content in a ebook or physical newsletter there’s absolutely no issue. But when you try to use it as online blog / website content you’re hit with a juggernaut problem: DUPLICATE CONTENT.

The problem with PLR articles is that you’re not the only one using them. Yup, about 20-400 other people (depending on the PLR provider) have the exact article content. So the gurus say what you should do next is to “re-write” these articles to make them unique.

But that itself is a paradox – why spend your time re-writing PLR articles when you can just write new ones? Why outsource article rewriting, when you can outsource article writing? Get my point?

That’s the main reason why although I do use PLR content to create free PDF reports and email messages, I never used them as blog content. That has changed recently after I discovered these services:

• Article Marketing Automation – Publish / receive unique articles and get one-way links from blogs
• 1WayLinks – Publish / receive unique articles and get one-way links from blogs
• JetSubmitter – Publish unique articles and get one-way links fro article directories
• Firepow – complete blog network including getting / publishing unique content, one-way links and socal bookmarking and much more.

All those services gave me an opportunity not only to use PLR articles as unique blog content, but also as great SEO and link building tools.

Of course by using the services I mentioned, your main goal with a PLR article is to get as many backlinks as possible by submitting it as content for other blogs and article directories. However, with their built-in article spinner / randomizer functions you should be able to get a more unique version of your PLR article. So in a way it’s killing two birds with one stone – creating content and getting backlinks.

Google Page Rank – This works in a pretty unique way because it is one of the most important algorithms and it brings in the concept of SEO to determine the rankings.

Few ways to improvise on your Google Rank for your blog:

• Usage of Keywords – Effective Google Searches can be referred to know more about the working of keyword phrases. It is better to have a keyword phrase for your site as it has to be the most used and most relevant parameter to shoot your ranking.
• Density of the Keyword – The required density of the keyword should be between 3 % – 5 % ideally. The number of times the keyword is repeated which is relevant to the context in a blog contributes to the rank.
• Linking of the Site – The hyperlinking of one’s site by others is ‘the’ most important measure by which the rankings are calculated. The links should be in between the posts or the article to add more value to the hyperlinking than just hyperlinking for the sake of it.
• Well designed page – Another significant influencer to the shooting of the ranking is the design content and properly organized pages. As goes the famous quote, good design is popular design.
• Proper Site Submission – The open directory project is widely regarded by Google as the most essential link in the calculation of its rankings. The best possible submission sites to be added to are dedicated directories and organizations.

Alexa Rank – As a subsidiary of Amazon, Alexa provides ranking of websites just based on web traffic on a particular site. This ranking works on web monetization strategy which focuses on the traffic which has visited a particular site by having an Alexa toolbar installed on them.

According to Alexa Traffic Rank, “The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time.”

Alexa ranking can be improved by adhering to the mentioned implementations:

• Firstly, install the Alexa toolbar and display the widget.
• Some article can be written about Alexa itself, just to get the required number of links.
• Enriching content writing and promotions on social networking sites and webmaster forums also helps the cause.
• Get the linking of your articles done to stumbleupon.com, digg.com and del.icio.us.
• Site optimization using the keyword phrases strategy.
• An unethical practice is enabling running of many scripts which in turn uses numerous multiple proxy servers to create a jump in the visitor list.

There are other ways also in which the Alexa ranking can receive a major boost.

Implement the above tips to see your rankings shoot up in the blogosphere!