** Question 3

Do you find that people are always coming to you wanting more information about your product or services and that maybe posting regular updates on Internet about this might free up your time to be spent on other activities?

** Question 4

Are you offering information products or services that you can provide 'tasters' of in a blog?

If you find yourself answering yes to most of these question then you should seriously consider starting your very own blog.

It's A Gut Feel Thing

Ultimately decision comes down to whether you have things to say to others on a one-to-one basis. Unlike many websites you see out there, a blog is very much a person-to-person experience. A corporate blog wouldn't really work unless you had a face and name that people could put to all posts.

It's also worth noting that a blog can be a two-way communication tool. Most of blog software available includes options for readers to be able to post comments in response to what has been written. This can be an excellent marketing and research tool for your business if handled in right way.

Whatever you do - don't take decision to start a blog lightly. It can be a big commitment and once you've started out on that road there's no going back. People will be regularly checking your blog after you've publicised it and pressure is then on to deliver readable material on a regular basis.

Some Blogging Software To Consider

Typepad - very popular and comes with a free trial and upgrade options: http://www.typepad.com BlogHarbour - also comes with a free 30-day trial http://www.blogharbor.com Blogger - 'grand daddy' of blogging http://www.blogger.com

Happy blogging!

My blog: http://michaelcheney.typepad.com/

Let's do some website analysis on this adobe.com. I'm going to use a software product called SEO Elite to do this, but you can analyze website manually if you choose to do so. I prefer SEO Elite because it only takes a few minutes, as opposed to several hours.

1. First, we'll select radio button 1. 2. Next, we'll enter URL from Google into step 2. (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html) 3. Next, we'll select Google from list of search engines. 4. Finally, click "ok" to run SEO Elite.

When it's finished running, let's click on "report view" tab to view some of results.

The first thing you should notice is Google Page Rank of all of pages linking to adobe.com. If you click column heading within SEO Elite labeled "Google PR", it will sort column in descending order.

You can see that pages linking to adobe.com have an extremely high Page Rank. Any website with a Page Rank of 6 or higher are VERY high page ranks. There are only a handful of PR9 websites on entire internet and a few are actually linking to adobe.com!

Next, let's click "analysis view" tab.

If we click column heading titled "anchor text", it will sort this column in descending order. We can quickly see that words "click" and "here" are within top 10 words listed in left hand column.

Remember, anchor text column will show you number of times word in "Word" column appears in actual anchor text of link pointing to adobe.com

Anchor Text: Example) Click here to download Adobe Acrobat Reader... "Click here" is anchor text in example above.

So, by looking at analysis above, we can see that word "click" appeared in 16 of links pointing to adobe.com and 6.8% of total links pointing to adobe.com contained keyword "click". The keyword "here" was found in 34 links pointing to adobe.com and appeared 14.5% of time.

Reason adobe.com is ranked #1

The main two reasons that adobe.com is ranked #1 for keyword "click here" is because:

1. The websites linking to adobe.com are very quality (have a high Page Rank) 2. The websites linking to adobe.com used keywords "click" and "here" many times in anchor text of links linking to adobe.com

There are a few other offpage optimization factors that help adobe.com to rank #1, but those are main two reasons. I hope you can clearly see power of offpage optimization (linking).

So, next time someone asks you what proper keyword density is, proper keyword prominence, proper number of times you need to bold, italicize, or underline a keyword on your page... You can tell them that onpage optimization is NOT critical when ranking well for a given search term.

Until next time, happy optimizing!