While there are many reasons to blog, there are two primary uses that are becoming more widespread with blogging: To game Google Adsense, and to also game the search engines for better rankings.

Since Blogs are known to the search engines as daily snippets of information that are updated on a frequent basis, they get a lot of preference in the search results.

So from this, how do you optimize your blog?

Depending on the service you utilize, there are still some basics that you can apply. The two biggest blogging sites are WordPress and Blogger. If you are looking for an advantage with SEO, you should use Blogger since they are owned by Google, and you’ll be indexed quicker.

The halo effect is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person’s positive or negative traits seem to “spill over” from one area of their personality to another in others’ perceptions of them. (as defined by Wikipedia)

So, how does this apply in the world of Search Engine Marketing?

It’s no secret that it takes more time to get a top ranking in Google than in MSN and Yahoo. Yahoo and MSN tend to allow newer sites top rankings within weeks, while Google will make a new site wait - this is done to prevent spammers from hogging up the top rankings through massive link campaigns.

Many times a client only looks at the bottom line when it comes to the performance they are getting for their investment into Search Engine Marketing.

They often only look at the selected keyword phrases that they are paying for, without fully realizing what other residual effects they are receiving.

When a site gets properly optimized, (SEO) it is being transformed into a thought-out navigational pattern to information. This is the same pattern a search engine spider looks for. Don’t forget, the easier you make it for a spider to index your site, the better your chances are for getting your site a higher placement in the search engine results page (SERP’s).

Officially announced on June 6th, 2005 at Google’e Blog, Google Site Map allows you to submit a listing of all your urls for Google to crawl.

There have been many questions concerning the procedure of creating a Google Site Map. Below is the non-Python way of creating one. (Note: Google has further documentation at their site)

First, create a file named sitemap.xml

Use the following code in any HTML editor:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc>http://www.sitename.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-06-30T14:12:14+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

SEO or search engine optimization, Every webmaster knows about this and struggles to make his website as search engine friendly as possible. But how many actually know what seo is all about? And how many follow this correctly?

THE BASICS

As we all know at least 70% of a website’s visitors are from search engine like GOOGLE, YAHOO! etc. So it is understood that your website must be search engine friendly enough to actually make Google understand what is there in your site. This is Search engine optimization.