The real benefit of hosting a blog and maintaining it has been a quick way to spread your business across the internet audiences. It has been proved by the search engine marketing specialists and bloggers in the past few years that a blog can benefits your website or business in very effective ways.

When you decide to host a blog on your website, the first question that comes up is where to setup a blog on your own website or separately. Each one has its own advantages that will help your website.

Where to Host Your Blog on Own Website or Separately?

There are two ways you can host your blog, either by creating an account on the blog platforms like Blogger or WordPress or simply installing your own blog software on your own website. Hosting a blog as a sub-domain of your own website looks like a professional approach and often preferred by those who want to boost their website ranking on search engines using blog as a tool.

Search engine ranking benefits

Setting up the blog in as a sub-domain on your existing website also benefits to your websites search engine ranking. Any new content that is added to your blog will be treated as new content part of your main website. Every new blog posts that you create are easily and quickly indexed than regular web pages. It thus helps promote better indexing and visibility of your main website, if the blog is hosted on the same domain name.

Backlinks benefits

If you spend some time and efforts on writing quality contents on your blog, you can easily attract the quality backlinks using those articles. If you host your blog on your main domain then all back-links will benefit your main domain. If your blog is on an external domain then back-links will not be directly passed on to your main website. However, you will still get the benefits if you are able to pull the PR and links from your separately hosted blog to your main website by cross linking. But, in order to get benefits via cross linking from your externally hosted blog it will need to be successful.

Brand targeting for business owners

Some business company’s or website owners can choose to start a blog on a completely new domain name. This can help if you wish to differentiate between the branding of your website and that of your blog. If the blog you are setting up is not directly related to the content on your main website, then you may not wish to combine the two on the same domain name.

If you wish to target on enforcing a collective brand for your company rather than creating a new brand for your blog, installing a blog as a part of your main website will help. If a blog is installed in a sub folder of your existing website, the blog URL will include your primary domain name in the address bar and appear as a cohesive entity.

Technical resources

If you are setting up a blog on your main website or domain name, you will require a certain level of technical skills in order to install the blog and add the database. If you are starting a blog using one of the free blog platforms then no software installation is required and a blog can be set up in a few easy steps.

Cost benefits

Another common reason for setting up an external blog outside of your main company website is the possibility for using one of the many available free online blog hosting services such as Blogger or Word Press. Most leading social networking websites such as Facebook also allow users to set up their own blog using their website platform. These services are usually free whereas setting up a blog on your main website or private domain name will require web hosting space and technical infrastructure.

So, decide your own where to host your blog, if it’s similar to your website and hosting it to boost your search engine rankings then definitely host it as a sub-domain of your own website.

Posted under Blogging, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization

Getting indexed in search engines is very much necessary to drive web traffic to your website. To get noticed by people you need to get index in search engines. If you submit your site manually to Google or any search engine it will normally take more than 4 weeks to get indexed. In this article I will show you the easy and fast way to get your website indexed in search engines.

First of all, indexing your website means to get your website visible in search engines. In order to get indexed, you have to follow few simple steps and will need the below listed things.

• Already built website and well-optimized for search engine traffic.
• Top 5 keywords, key phrases related to your website content.
• A clear head.

Content Bait

First of all, take top 5 popular keywords or key phrases and make 5 article titles using them. For example, if my keywords are software, website & article, then my article titles could be:

How to use software
How to create a website
How to write an article

Of course you should be more original than this using your own keywords but you get the idea. Now that you have your article titles, you now need to write a brief article for each title. It doesn’t need to be the best article in the world, just make sure that it’s original. Around three paragraphs for each article are good. Try to use as many of your keywords or phrases in the article content as possible but don’t over do it to the extent that the article doesn’t make sense.

Creating Blogs

Now, that you have your five articles ready, select the one that you think is the best and most relevant to your website and put it to one side, we will come back to that one later. We now need to create a couple of blog accounts to house our articles. First of all visit blogger.com and create an account using one of your most popular keywords… For example if your keyword is “shoes”, make sure your blog URL is shoes.blogspot.com or sports-shoes.blogspot.com.

Take the time to modify your new blog a little, create an introduction post, change the template, and put bit information in the profile, that sort of thing. Once your blog is looking ok, its time to post two of your four articles on your blog. Remember I told you to use as many keywords as possible in your blog. Before submitting your post, convert a couple of these keywords to links to your website. Again, don’t over do it and try to link to separate, relevant pages on your website, not just the homepage. Once your done and your blogspot blog is published on the web its time to move on to the next one. Visit WordPress site, get another blog containing your keyword and repeat the steps for your other two articles.

The fifth article

So,  now you have two Blogs all setup and ready to send you traffic but what about that fifth article I told you to put to one side earlier. Let’s get that one out there too. We are now going to submit your fifth article to some of the many article directories out there. Now you of course you could do this manually but I’ve found the best solution is to use one of the many article submitters that are now available. Simply search Google for “free article submitter” and I’m sure you will find one.

Make sure to fill in all the forms accurately and thoughtfully. The objective is to get your article published so don’t scrimp on the description etc.

Ping the robots

The next step is to tell all the search engine robots about your blog. There are literally hundreds of these so called ping services out there but for this article I’m only going to use only one because that’s really all you need to begin with. Visit pingomatic.com and enter the information for both of your blogs. Remember to enter your information carefully and accurately.

Quit tool

Quit is a tool developed by Eli at Bluehatseo site. You can find a link to the tool in the header on the blog. He won’t tell anybody exactly what it does but I can assure you it works. Again make sure you fill in all the information about your two blogs correctly before you click submits. Only click submit once, the tool can take about 20 seconds to work so be patient.

Directories, Directories & Directories

If you have completed the above steps completely and properly it shouldn’t be more than 24 hours before your website is indexed by Google, Yahoo and some of the other search engines. So what do you do while you are waiting? Directories my friend. A lot of so called SEO experts say that submitting your website to directories is no longer worth the hassle but don’t listen to them. Any inbound link you can get to your website, no matter what the quality is worth its weight in gold.

If you take your time and submit your website to the correct category of directories I can assure you it will increase the amount of bots visits and indeed user visits to your website. You can find a huge list of directories on my website at the large list of directories page. Take your own time to choose the good ones to suit your website.

Link Exchanging

Finally as an extra step to getting your website indexed you should try asking other webmasters to exchange links with you. There are literally hundreds of link building companies and services out there or you could visit forums such as the Link Exchange Forum and post your link exchange request in the correct topic.

Make sure you follow the above steps properly, and watch your website getting indexed very quickly.

Posted under Blogging, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization