As you know, we’ve encouraged you to blog for business. Here are some tips on starting and maintaining a sucessfull blog posted at  http://chris.pirillo.com

• Don’t think you are going to get rich quick. Blogging takes a ton of effort, work and time.
• Do choose a niche!  Make a list of your top 5 things to do. Those are all potential blog topics. Blog about what you like and know, otherwise it will get boring and become a chore.
• Do read other blogs in the niche you choose. It keeps you up-to-date on the latest news in your niche, and will give you ideas for posts. A feed reader is a good way to do this.   Read ProBlogger or LockerGnome for more tips on making money blogging.
• Do comment on other blogs in your niche. This will help get your name out, and drive traffic to your blog. .
• Don’t rush into it. Plan ahead. This is probably the single most important thing when you start a new blog. Choose a name for your blog, get a domain name get a design and get hosting. Write a few posts ahead of time.

The Web Design Team at mackeywebdesign.com

How do you know which search terms/keywords to use in your website optimization?

You want good descriptive keywords, with the most online searches performed, and the least competitive websites.

You can use Goggle’s Free Keyword Tool here . Type in a phrase you believe your website should be found under. Once you find a great keyword/search term, go to Google and run a search on it. See how many pages you get for your matches. Checking the right hand side on top (Results 1 - 10 of about 7,900,000 for…)

Do this a few times and rate your keywords from 1 through 3, with 1 being most important.

You can also have a professional search engine marketing company  helps with this and do a full Keyword Anaysis for you. They can also help optimize your website for the search engines, using your chosen keywords, and help you come up when someone does an online search for these terms.

The Web Design Team at mackeywebdesign.com

Index times vary depending on the search engine. Some search engines offer paid options if you wish to be indexed more quickly.

Allow 3- 4 months for your web site to be indexed.  If you aren’t showing up at all, then you need to look at keywords, content, title, description and keyword tags.

If you do, and want to rank better, then you can hire a search engine optimization company.

If your website takes a long time to load, it might time out before the spider finishes indexing. To avoid this, limit your page size.

Use reliable web hosting. If your web site is down when the search engine spider visits, it won’t get indexed. If you are indexed  and when they spider your site and it’s not responding, your site could be removed from the database.

If you use questionable techniques (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background) a search engine may  reject your submissions.

If your web site shares the same IP address as other Web sites, you may find your website penalized because of something someone else did. Check with your hosting company  to see if your domain name has its own unique IP assigned to it. If it does not, ask them to move it to its own IP.

Some search engines like Google and HotBot have been known to refuse to index web sites unless they can see other websites link back to them. Or, they may index you for a while, but remove you after a certain period of time because you didn’t achieve any external links to your website.

Simple is better. Fancy scripts and code on a page can hurt your search engine rankings. Dynamic pages with URLs containing special symbols are often ignored by search engines. You need to consider creating “static” versions of each page you want indexed.

When you submit your website to a directory like Yahoo, Open Directory, LookSmart, and others, humans review your website. They decide if it’s good enough to be listed. These directories can help you get indexed by other search engines. So make sure your submission is error free and that your website follows good web design rules.

The Web Design Team at mackeywebdesign.com

Make your website simple

• So it’s easy for you to update.
• So it’s easy for visitors to navigate the web site.

Websites should be built up as a series of components

• Create logical divisions in your website’s structure.
• Extract common elements (like footers) out of your web pages.
• Use external CSS style sheets.

Design Balance

• Is your web page easy on the eyes, or is there too much information there?
• Is there too much content on a page to be specific, making it hard for the engine to index your pages properly?
• Do you have ‘breathing room’ in your page so that it is easy on the eyes?

The job of a good web designer is to understand and apply good rules of web design.

The Web Design Team at
mackeywebdesign.com

Here is a helpful article explaining Adsense revenue fluctuations. The entry is called Diagnosing and treating revenue fluctuations (Part II). If you’d just like to brush up on those reporting terms, visit this previous post from earlier in the week.

The Web Design Team at
mackeywebdesign.com

Google announced a push to get advertisers and publishers to utilize video ads.

Google said they will sell both “InVideo” ads, where a video ad appears at the bottom of a video, as well as text overlay ads that put text below a video. The InVideo ads are paid on a CPM basis, while the text overlay ads are paid on a CPC basis. To see demos of both formats, click here.

For more information, visit Google Video Advertising Solutions.

The Web Design Team at
mackeywebdesign.com

Here are a few books that might help in your quest to flawless web design.

Web Design in a Nutshell, by Jennifer Niederst Robbins (3rd edition).
If you don’t want to go too “deep” in thinking about web design, then this book gives a quick and colorful overview of the main issues.

Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, Style Sheets, and Web Graphics, by Jennifer Niederst Robbins (3rd edition).
The book does go beyond basic HTML to explain CSS, graphics formats, and the differences between browsers (”platform idiosyncrasies” as the publisher delicately puts it).

Cascading Style Sheets, Third Edition: Designing for the Web, by Hakon Lie and Bert Bos.
Cascading style sheets (CSS) are without a doubt the way to manage presentation design across any medium- or large-size website.  The authors are “the world authorities” on stylesheets, having been the original leaders of the Web Consortium’s stylesheet project, so this is the ultimative reference for HTML stylesheets.

Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization, by Andy King.
All about response time and how to make it faster (i.e., better). Even broadband users benefit when web pages are faster, and if you have many dial-up users (or traveling users) you have to make response time one of the top priorities for your site. This books tells you how.

The Web Design Team at
mackeywebdesign.com