Blog Tides
Updates, Revenue Sharing and Direction
Posted on August 28, 2009
Category: blogging | Leave a Comment
Where is BlogTides heading? This is a question that I’m often asked and it gets me thinking about the direction I want to take this blog and its hosted blogs. Well, the hosted blogs will go wherever they will go as they are are on a variety of different subjects and the owners will take them to where they need to be.
But as for the home base, or more specifically this blog, it needs some direction other than just being a admin info blog. After all, there’s only so much you can write about as a site admin especially when there are not many changes coming along. Ok, there was the recent upgrade to the WP software to bring it right up to date. There are plans to further upgrade the site with new plugins, new themes and a more robust revenue sharing program that will allow chikita and amazon ads to be served as well as adsense, ebay and kontera. These are in the testing stage and will be rolled out quite soon once the bugs are ironed out. You probably won’t notice the difference right away unless you’re looking to change themes or happen to chech your revenue share.
On that note, ebay of course is now not allowed (unless you happen to be the host domain owner) as EPN have changed the rules forbidding their ads to be shown on any domain you don’t personally own. That includes WPmu hosts, Blogger blogs, Wordpress blogs (not that you could ever show ads on there), geocites, blinkweb, blogetery and any of the other free blogging platforms. You can still serve ebay ads on hub pages and squidoo lenses, but you must use their own module and not the rss feeds that gave you 100% of the revenue.
Ok, thats about all for now. I’ll post again when the new updates take effect and in the meantime will have a long hard think about the direction of this blog!
Admin
BlogTides
Make Use of All The Search Engines
Posted on July 29, 2009
Category: search engines | Leave a Comment
So where are we now? It seems that blogs are cleaned up and looking better, which after all is what you want them to be in order to rank them well in the search engine index for the various search engines. I mention these because you have to remember that Google is not the only search engine that brings traffic to your blog.
Ok, its the major search engine, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking there is anything better out there for generating targeted traffic to your blog. But the other contenders such as Yahoo, Bing and Ask are all places to get traffic from, even if its far lower in volume. And here’s the rub.
While you’re working your asses off to get ranked well over at Google, you’re up against a shed load of competition all trying to do the same thing. The result is that your blog is not going to rank well to begin with and it will take a fair amount of time before it does. In the meantime, the other search engines are largely ignored by the kind of people who know how to rank well in Google’s pages.
That means you can rank well in Yahoo or Bing etc fairly quickly and somewhat easier and still attract some target traffic which you can convert into dollars at your blog. So don’t dis-count the other engines when you’re doing all the things you need to do in order to rank well in the SERPs. They can step in and provide you with a source of income, albeit a trickle when compared with the potential of Google, but a trickle is better than nothing, right?
Admin
BlogTides
Compliance with Quality Guidelines
Posted on June 8, 2009
Category: blogging | Leave a Comment
Here at BlogTides, we’re as concerned as anyone else that all blogs created on this host are of good standard and comply with Google’s quality guidelines. When everything is ship shape and orderly, then there can be no reason for getting your blog penalized or even de-indexed from the search engine’s pages. So here are some thing you can do to make sure your blog is clean:
Do’s:
Write good, readable and relevant content in your blog. This is probably one of Google’s main reasons for indexing your blog and placing it in the index, because their aim is to bring quality to the people searching their index. While we know having lots of quality backlinks is also a deciding factor in getting good placement in the SERPs, this is part of SEO and nothing to do with Google’s quality guidelines. So do your blog a favour and write some good articles!
Do link out to authority sites if you make a reference to information that can be found there.
Do make friends with other bloggers in social networks as this will bring you valuable links to increase the authority of your blog.
Do optimize your blog for its main and long tail keywords so that you’ll feature in the right place in Google’s index.
Don’t’s:
Don’t go linking to bad neighbourhood websites/blogs. This is one of the fastest ways of getting your blog de-indexed because Google hates spam as much as you do.
Don’t put up paid links. If you do, you’ll get found out and penalized for doing so.
Don’t keyword stuff your posts. Too high a density of keywords will trigger a flag that could prevent your post being indexed and could hurt the SERPs placement of your blog.
Don’t duplicate content from other blogs. This is plagiarizing and no one likes a thief. You could also be violating copyright laws so don’t do it. Write your own articles or at least re-write other peoples’ so the finished item will pass Copyscape. You could always get a ghost writer to write your content for you as well, as long as its original.
Ok, these are the main points that will keep your blog above board and legitimate. As long as you keep Google happy, they will be kind to you and your blog can go far with plenty of work from you. So don’t go and spoil it by doing something stupid!
Admin
BlogTides
