If you ever needed a further indication that we LOVE comments here on Slyvisions, this should take care of that in perpetuity.  Today I’m talking about a point commenter Jose Anajero posted on our “How Smiling Can Kill Your Blog” post.  He said:

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Now that’s not a tactic most of us have likely thought of.  But it’s no less true for the novelty–next time you go to write a blog headline, take a look at it, and think, does this make a good article?

Of course, it’s not MUCH of an article.  We’re talking about a one sentence article here that’s likely less than eleven words.  But looking at it in that sense will give you a LOT of help when it comes to writing your blog, in three specific ways..

You’ll get more attention this way.  People don’t spend a whole lot of time reading every single article out there.  If you can snag attention with one quick headline, you’re much more likely to get someone to read.

You’ll get more targeted attention.  If your title post is a small article by itself, then people will know, upon reading it, if it means anything to them.  Thus, you’ll know that most of your readers didn’t just stumble in, but wanted to read the post.

You’ll get a great keyword focus.  Your article will essentially revolve around keywords.  The rest of the article is basically just elaboration on those keyword points, so Google should fall in love with your article and give it great attention.

So if you make sure your headline could be an article on its own, you should get a lot farther with your posting efforts.

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Now this isn’t something I knew right away, and so I’m going to pass it on to you in the hopes that some of you were just as in the dark as I was.  Always remember–ignorance is no shame unless you leave it alone.

Most blogs live and die by Google.  it’s the top search engine, so getting to the top of the line can only help your blog.  And the way you get there is with keywords, as we’re all pretty much aware.  But what you may not know is that Google search engines are LAZY.  They want their keywords at the FRONT of a post title!

For instance, like you see above.  “Buzz Monitoring” is a pretty big Google keyword.  So Instead of making the title “Keywords To The Front With Buzz Monitoring”, I put “buzz monitoring” to the front of the title.

Anything you can do to keep Google interested can only help, so remember, put your best phrases forward.

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It’s a question you should ask yourself–can my blog handle vlogs?

A vlog, simply put, is a Video bLOG.  And if your blog is a Wordpress blog, as many of them are these days, it’s very, VERY, easy to slip a video in there.  You might think that you don’t have the face for video, or the stage presence, or the equipment.  But if you spent a half-hour or so on YouTube, you’ll discover that that doesn’t stop a lot of people.  Even posting a video to YouTube isn’t difficult; many camcorders will come with a “one touch upload” button that automatically handles a lot of common YouTube issues.

Meanwhile, a video blog reaps at least three separate benefits you’ll love.

1. A video blog gets a whole new audience involved.  People who’d never find your blog because they’re spending all their time on YouTube might well find what you have to say exciting.

2. A video blog gets you extra credibility at Google. If you’ve got a blog with keywords and such, you’ll get ahead when you have a separate video blog with keywords PLUS the blog posting of your video with keywords.

3. A video blog gives you access to a whole new field of endeavor.  Maybe you’ve thought about collecting your blog posts into a book or even an e-book.  But with video, you could release your own DVD.  If your blog is particularly entertaining you could even try to get it to video stores or distributors.  Or it could even get you on TV proper–hey, it worked for Lonelygirl15!

So when you add these together, the end result is that it may be a smart idea to consider doing a little video blogging alongside your regular turn of blogs.

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Your post titles are the first thing that your readers and potential readers see. Its the link in the search results and it is what most readers base their decision on when deciding to read the rest of your post.

So why do you spend so little time on them? Perhaps because it is just that one liner at the top of the page, after all it doesnt take up as much space as the post itself so it can’t be that important can it?

Here are 3 things that will make your Titles bad:

1. Writing them before you write the post - we all do it, thinking that it will define what we write, but actually it doesn’t. Write your post first then write the title to make sure it fits.
2. Trying to be clever - Catchy titles are great if you can really pull them off, the problem with them is that they often don’t contain keywords, so they work well for your readers, but only if they can find the post in the first place. Leave the clever writing for the body.
3. Being too cautious - Take a position with your titles, be controversial, ask a question, make a statement. When potential readers are scanning those first ten results on page one of google you need to jump off the page at them.

What do you do to make your titles stand out?

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Picking a domain name for your blog can be a lot harder than you might at first think. Especially if it has a popular theme. A lot of the obvious choices will already have been taken.  That’s where some automated services come in and suggest domain names for you.

Here are three that will help you out:

1.) NameBoy - This is a helpful generator which allows you to enter keywords and ideas and comes up with a unique and intelligent combination for your domain name. It also has a couple checkboxes such as allowing hyphens or rhyming. When it gives you your results it shows the possible extensions that the domain is available in.

2.) Domain Name Generator - This is a very intelligent tool which comes up with great name creations based on the criteria your provide. It is very detailed and offers options for languages, prefixes and suffixes, character length, and more. Highly recommended.

3.) Whoix? - The Whoix? Domain Name Wizard is great if you already have an idea of what you’d like to call your site, but you need plenty more suggestions and variations. It’s simple: all you do is enter in a domain name and extension you would like, and Whoix? offers you other ideas. Quick, easy, but immensely valuable.

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As an internet marketer who does a lot of work with websites and marketing, I know how much work I need to put in to SEO if I want to constantly get search traffic. SEO is a big part of managing a website because everyone knows the power of search engines. If you never ever promoted your site or bought ads on other sites, you can at least get traffic from search engines right?

With all the SEO blogs out there, it’s just hard to keep up. But fortunately for me, James Harrison from JameSEO asked me to review his blog. It was then that I discovered another undiscovered blog that has a lot of hidden treasures.

Who Is James?

My name is James Harrison. I’m an internet marketer working full-time for MEA Digital in downtown San Diego. I work as an Online Media Specialist in the Pay Per Click department and love every minute of it.

I truly enjoy working on the internet, especially in the field of search engine marketing.

During the day, I manage pay-per-click campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Business.com and other 2nd-tier PPC interfaces.

But, during the night I’m a SEO working on personal websites and studying new search engine optimization strategies. 

As you can see, James is the real deal. He works for an interactive agency as web SEO. This guy knows his stuff.

According to James about page, his blog has two simple purposes: 1) it’s the place where he records all his SEO marketing notes, and 2) he wants to rank #1 for the search term “James Harrison” (his name). The first purpose is understandable, but the second? JameSEO.com as #1 for the term “James Harrison”? Last time I checked, he’s only 7 spots behind from news stories of the NFL player James Harrison! With over 1,000,000 search results and claiming the #7 spot, he truly is doing something right.

The Design

So now let’s talk about the blog and its design.

To be honest with you, I don’t really like the design. I think that it’s one of the things that would repel readers away, or keep them from coming back. My simple advice to James is this: try out different themes and see how they go. You might have picked this one because of its simplicity, but there are other good ones out there that are really nice looking. Just get rid of this one.

The sidebar, meanwhile, has too much stuff going on especially the section with all the little buttons. I’m sure that you might need them because they’re required to be put on the blog somewhere, but try to keep the only ones that are necessary. The SiteMeter button, for example, can be placed in the footer while the Yahoo “Links to This Site” can be completely removed. There’s too much stuff going on and you need to fix them.

SEO Tips and Tricks

Now let’s get to the treasures within the blog. What I like about the articles that James writes is that he actually walks you through each and every one of them. He also adds in images that complements what he talks about.

Anyway, below are 5 great articles from JameSEO that I’ve read. You NEED to read them because I promise you, almost all of them will be new to you.

• 13 Search Operators for Ultimate Link Building
• Keyword Placement: Thinking of Places to Place Your keywords
• A Few Backlink Factors I Tend to Think About
• Link Tunneling Explained - Link Building SEO
• Onpage SEO: Title Tags Change Search Engine Rankings

Other than the great articles that James writes, he also composed a lists of tools and resources for SEO, so make sure to check them out.

The Sly Guy Recommendation

James clearly is an expert on the topic of SEO. If you own a static website or a blog, then you must check out JameSEO and subscribe. As JameSEO grows, it will just keep on getting better with more and more SEO tips and tricks. James will eventually get a new and better design (preferably a premium theme) that will compliment with the great content that he writes. So go ahead, visit JameSEO!

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This guest post is from Salwa, a 22 year-old digital artist, designer and blogger from the U.K. If you enjoy this post, be sure to check her out at BlogRiffic.com and subscribe to her RSS Here.

Search engine optimization is a big part of managing a website, whether it’s a blog or not. It’s a surefire way of getting organic traffic through search engines like Google. Even without any type of promotion done by the webmaster, sites can always expect traffic coming from search engines.

There are several ways to optimize your Wordpress blog for search engines. Here are five that should be at the top of everyone’s list.

1. The title of your post contains the most important words of your post. It is used to describe the topic of the post and helps readers to decide whether they want to read it. It should contain keywords that you think readers will type into their web browsers. Make sure the title is a live link. If Wordpress hasn’t already done this automatically, you should be able to conduct a search on the web for the necessary code to do this. You should also make sure the page title tag is optimized. This will allow you to use a more descriptive, keyword-rich title for your blog’s main page and will use the title of your post as your page title to make your keywords prevail.
2. Use link bait. This is the latest hot topic in SEO and is becoming the preferred way for natural link building. Link baiting is used to attract backlinks to your blog by getting people talking about it. This is the art of writing content that gets natural links. You should post your link bait on all of the major social network sites. Also, make sure you include a “link to me” textbox, which is a Wordpress plug-in that provides a coded box automatically. Link to and reference other bloggers with similar blogs to get attentions from them. If you have a good blog, they may link to it in return.
3. Always check your Wordpress blog on a mobile phone since so many users today are on the go and tend to check in periodically via mobile phone web when they have a quick opportunity. Don’t have a ton of ads on your blog. This isn’t the place to be selling shamelessly. Having a lot of ads and graphics will only slow your site down and irritate visitors.
4. Most of the link power will be coming straight to the home page of your blog and then goes out to the rest of the links. Make sure you have a good link structure. They should link to your most important articles and pages from the home page. Simply make a category with your best articles and then make a list of them on the index.php file. You can install a plug-in called “related posts” and have those articles link to other relevant articles.
5. Make sure you pay attention to your design. Keeping it simple is always best. Use larger text with large, clear headings. There should be nothing that takes your attention away from the text.  Make sure your content is the first thing your visitor sees, they should not have to scroll to find your content.  If you can make your blog look more like a website than a blog, the larger social networking sites will like it better.

The WordPress platform, along with much of the other blogging software available today, is search engine friendly right out of the box. It does a very good job of handling many of the technical areas of optimization for you so if you aren’t a technical genius you can still have a great blog. Simply provide informative, keyword-rich content that people will want to read and link to, and you are pretty much set to go. Blogging is not hard; it just takes some time and effort. Just take care not to get your blog up and running and then think that it will simply take care of itself. Take the time to optimize it as much as you can or your blog will eventually disappear in the search engines.

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