Folks, there comes a time in every blogger’s life where he looks at his traffic and his flagging adsense revenue and has to ask, is it ME?  You go out, and promote, and promote some more, and you’re posting at a pretty good clip and at regular times of the day, and by all accounts, you’re doing the right things.  Your posts have plenty of keywords but they’re not link bait.  You’re drawing attention with your headlines but not ignoring the SEO possibilities.  You read Problogger and Slyvisions EVERY DAY to try and catch new ideas (okay, so maybe I’m getting a bit grandiose there, but still).

And your blog just still isn’t going anywhere.

So like I said…you have to ask the toughest question of all.  Am I any good at blogging?

This isn’t a question people want to ask.  No one wants to hear they have no talent.  That’s why most people would rather WATCH American Idol than go ON American Idol.  They want to hear how badly OTHER people suck, not how bad THEY suck!  But you can find out.  Talk to your friends, any of your blogging contemporaries.  Send out links to your blog.  Specifically request they not spare your feelings as you want to improve, and MEAN it.

Then, see what’s wrong, and try to fix it.

There’s only one way to be a better writer, folks, and that is TO WRITE.  It’s the very definition of “writer”.

Writer. Noun. One who writes.

But if you’re willing to practice, to turn in the work even if no one’s watching, keep up the promotion and everything else, chances are you can become a good writer…even if you aren’t right now.

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So I was reading around like I do, and the crew out at seomoz gave me a great idea to whomp up and pass around to you.

No doubt many of you are seasoned blogging professionals.  This advice may not be so helpful to you.  But to those of you just getting started, consider this:  don’t let people comment on your blog.

You might wonder if this isn’t counterproductive.  Didn’t I, after all, spend several posts railing on the concept of building community?  I did, no mistake there, but if you’re too new to have a community, showing that you have no community makes your blog look weak and unprofessional.  So what they recommend you do is wait to add a comments section until you have one or both of the following:

1. At least one hundred RSS subscribers per day

2. At least seven hundred fifty unique visitors per day.

There’s definitely something to be said for keeping the lid on commentary until your audience justifies such a measure, though I’m not sure it’s the best.  After all, it does something of a disservice to your early readership, the ones you’re counting on most, to not allow them to comment on your posts.

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Let’s face it, folks. You can have the best blog ever known by mankind.  You’ve got traffic monitors and more hot links than a sausage factory.  If Cory Doctorow saw your blog he would drop to his very knees in awe and ecstasy, tears of joy trickling gently down his face.

But if no one sees it, then what good is it?

Like asking the question about trees falling in the woods and the sounds they make when no one’s around to hear them, so too does your blog run on readers.

I know, this is sort of a basic-level concept, but it’s the kind of thing that you may not be thinking of in a rush of ideas about the long tail and web 2.0 and the legion of other buzzwords that you hear about blogging on a daily basis.  But it’s the kind of thing you’d do well to bear in mind.  Remember, it’s all about the readers.  What do they want to see?  What do they want to know more about?  The more you can do to engage your readership, the more they’ll do to keep you alive and blogging.  And the more your readership does, the better your bottom line as a blogger looks.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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!

Popularity: 3% [?]

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.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Do you know how to build links to the sites that you own? Link building is something that is a very important part of internet marketing, especially for site owners like us who want to get more exposure for their site. It helps with SEO, getting traffic, and increasing the readership of your site. Check out LinkBuildingWiki.com and you’ll find all the great resources on link building.

What Is Link Building Wiki?

Link Building Wiki is a, well, wiki full of resources about link building from the people who brought you TextLinkBrokers. The whole site is divided into different sections like how you would see in any wiki from Wikipedia. From compilations of blog and forum posts to sites and tools all about link building, this wiki helps users like us to find what we want.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Have you ever wanted to just be able to talk to one of the “A-List” bloggers about your blog/site and ask them to tell you how you can improve it? You have probably already tried emailing them and saying things like “how can I get more traffic to my site?” or “how come I am only getting 10-20 hits a day to my site?”. Then all you got was a short response that didn’t answer your question. Or maybe they didn’t even reply back at all. I know this because I was in this position when I first started blogging and making money online…

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Some of the latest videos and SEO tips I posted, Qualities of a Good Website and Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers, had useful lessons from the Google engineer, Matt Cutts. In this video, he answers a few questions about SEO (search engine optimization) and some myths. Topics include things about using sites on the same server, launching sites with millions of pages, and updates on Google Images.

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