Whether starting out with a new domain name, or a domain that’s been around for a decade, you can rank your blog on Google if you just do what Google wants you to do. So here are 25/50 tips to get your blog ranked by the world’s biggest SE.

50. Build your own or move to Wordpress. Wordpress is a blog platform that’s open source (free), robust, extensible and easy to use. Add Feedburner, which equips site owners to broadcast RSS feeds and develop user metrics. Next, synch up Google Analytics and a sitemap plug-in to simplify populating the blog and developing useful, actionable metrics. Also, make sure your blog is pinging Technorati and other social media sites like digg.

49. Don’t worry aboutpage rank. PR is highly over-rated as a yardstick of online success. Connectivity within a web community and expansion through content syndication and guest blogging are more critical to building site credibility than page rank. PR will take care of itself over time if you do it right.

48. Make a difference, or at least have a clear purpose. Differentiate your content on every post. Cover lots of editorial ground.

47. Use a conversational tone. Dry, starchy academic writing is strictly for the textbooks. Write words that people “hear” instead of read.

46. Provide a “Tell Your Friends” link on your blog. Birds of a feather do, indeed, flock together. So, if one of your regulars shares an interest in philately, chances are s/he has other friends with an interest in stamp collecting.

45. Study the competition. They’re studying you. Check out SpyFu to do a little undercover work on search analytics employed by competitor sites and their visitors. You can’t touch the content but you can’t copyright an idea, either, so pick up some new paths of thought from others in your site’s arena.

44. Remember SEO basics. Use provocative, keyword-rich title tags, meta keywords and descriptions, and only link to high-quality sites. Never over do it. Keep your posts relevant, natural, accurate and, above all, current.

43. Don’t stuff blog post titles with keywords. It’s a form of keyword stuffing and spiders hate keyword stuffing. The ratio in headlines should be ~40% keywords, ~60% non-keywords.

42. Submit your URL to blog directories. There are “best of the web,” and paid directories, like Yahoo, and free directories like the Open Directory Project. Every directory listing is another link to your site and another way visitors can find you. Just google them to find more.

41. Create blog categories that contain keywords, i.e., Ecommerce, SEO, Affiliates, etc. for use with a “site hosting” or “site design” blog.

40. Content quality counts. Research topics about which target readers want to learn. Write something new, useful and relevant. And don’t forget to regularly update older posts. Things change fast on the web so last year’s “next big thing” is this year’s hackneyed cliché.

39. Vary topics, content length, relevancy and posting times. However, be consistent, as well. Keep blogging. It can take time for a blog to catch the notice of a search engine spider.

38. Get guest bloggers. Add links from their blogs and establish your site’s link community. There are people within your web neighborhood with opinions and good information. Contact them to invite submissions to your blog and your site in general.

37. Don’t use duplicate content. The only duplicate content that appears in your blog posts are quotes, and they should be identified with quotation marks.

36. Call posters by name. If Bob M. from Athens, Georgia, posts to your blog, recognize his contribution with a “Thanks, Bob” at the end of your response.

35. Make friends with other bloggers in your commercial, business or NFP space. Ask to become a guest blogger, or seek endorsements from the “names” within your site sphere.

34. Send a personal note to posters. Not all bloggers have the time to do this but if you can send a personal email thank-you note to a poster, you’ve increased the chances of that poster becoming a member of your site community.

33. Encourage viral link building. Take a stand. Introduce the coming paradigm shift in web commerce, provoke controversy. It sells. Just ask Ann Coulter.

32. Ensure the blog is optimized for Technorarri. Claim your blog, set an avatar and pings, use tags where appropriate and be sure to ping various blog tracking sites.

31. Don’t place ads on your blog, yet. If you feel you must (you’re seeing nice PPC revenues), determine that your site’s HTML is optimized to position those ads at the bottom of each blog page.

30. If your blog isn’t pulling, have the code reproduced so it’s as semantic, accessible and code-to-content optimized as possible. Also, hire a code expert to position content above ads or any other content in the site markup.

29. Ignore Alexa. A lot of new site owners rely on Alexa for site metrics but remember, Alexa is a popularity metric since only Alexa toolbar users contribute data — and that’s a less-than-universal test population.

28. Build credibility. Publishing authorities on your site’s topicality usually does the trick. Once blog credibility is established, identify trends, solve new problems and gradually expand the topic range of your blog.

27. Buy or build a hot blog design and submit it to design galleries. Hire a site/blog designer, or bring your vision to fruition. This enables your blog to appear five or six demographic iterations from your home site, expanding the site’s reach outside the immediate site community. This creates new marketing channels fast.

26. Develop some friendly contacts on social media sites and participate in the community. Ask contacts to promote your blog content. Also ask for contributors. People love to express their opinions.

25. Focus on ranking for three key words or phrases to start. The keywords you select should appear in your HTML title tags and within the site’s content when appropriate. However, watch keyword density levels. Anything above 5% starts to sound like gibberish. 2% to 3% keyword density provides more creative latitude for the content developer, and still lets bots know what the site is about.

24. Only purchase ad links on relevant niche sites. This, by default, limits competitive links and delivers more qualified (knowledgeable and ready-to-purchase) visitors to your site.

23. Participate in your link community. Forum and blog links are ephemeral, lasting a day or two as web fodder, so there’s always the need for more green. Interact by posting to not only drive traffic with the link, but to also pick up another link from a credible site. All good.

22. Publish new content on weekdays. Even search engines need a break. Actually, more people are online Monday through Friday so your latest blog post is still the latest when posted on Monday rather than Sunday. A little thing, for sure, but little things mean a lot online.

21. Write content for various experience levels. For many spaces DIYs are the largest sector. Some readers are just starting out. Others have been at it for years and probably know more than you do, so post blogs to appeal to a broad range of skill sets — from green rookie to wizened old vet.

20. Cite the sources of your content. This adds credibility to your posts. It also provides a trail for a reader interested in learning more about the topic at hand.

19. Focus on contextual relevancy before quantity of links. Connectivity within a market or topic segment has more value than SEO anchor text, at least in the short term.

18. Poll your readers. Everybody’s got an opinion. Provide a platform to let posters and readers vote on a topic related to your site. It doesn’t do any good if you run a retail outlet and poll visitors on who they’d like to see in the White House. Stay on topic.

17. Create surveys. Surveys are more in depth than a poll. One survey you might want to try is one in which buyers rate the services and products you sell. Great marketing information. Consider placing a satisfaction survey somewhere on your site.

16. Write about popular brands or celebrities where possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging short sales in the market or clothing for the over-sized human, celebrity and name brands get picked up by spiders.

15. Find free stuff to give away. Free still works on the web. There’s lots of open source software (OSS), mortgage calculators, real-time stock feeds and other digital goodies that visitors can download free. Free is nice.

14. Answer questions on Google groups and Yahoo Answers. People write in with all sorts of questions, some sure to fall within your area of expertise. By signing on as an authority in a field (your arena) you build credibility. Plus, it’s fun helping others from the comfort of your own work station.

13. Add imagery and video content to your posts. A picture is worth a thousand web words. Charts and graphs simplify complex information and don’t take up a lot of room. If you aren’t an artist, create a relationship with a freelancer. Never use clip art.

12. Use QA sessions in your blog. You’re the expert. Also, invite guest bloggers to handle questions beyond your skill set. Helpful, simple advice keeps visitors coming back and makes you a guru.

11. Syndicate content outside of your blog. Every site owner needs content. Fortunately, there’s plenty of it free for the taking. Sites like Helium, Ezine and Go Articles are content supermarkets. Post your piece and pick up non-reciprocal, in-bound links for your effort. Content syndication increases link popularity.

10. Direct (future) page rank efforts to well-optimized content on your home site. Don’t direct visitors and bots to the garbage bin of out-dated content stored in the site’s archives. Point them to the new news.

9. Update or create a Wikipedia page and link to your site. Another means of establishing yourself as an authority. Just make sure the Wiki piece is accurate, well written and typo-free.

8. Submit industry or topical news to general news sites. Not just industry related sites. If a small oil and gas company brings in a gusher, it’s of broader interest than to just industry insiders. Also adds credibility and another link.

7. Deep links or links to sub-pages are vital. There’s a tendency to link from a remote site to your home page. Not necessarily the best strategy. Consider linking to pages deeper in the site – pages related directly to your blog post. This way, visitors are in your site and less likely to bounce.

6. Respond to comments in your blog. This accomplishes three important objectives: (1) it shows that there’s a human behind the blog; (2) it gives you a chance to show your expertise; and (3) you can lead the thread in a new direction or keep the discussion going. Oh, it’s also the polite thing to do, as well.

5. Cross link your posts. Link amongst your related blog posts using the keywords you’re optimizing your blog for as the anchor text.

4. Get linked alongside related blogs on other sites. You can contact the blog administrator to swap links, you can become a regular guest blogger if your writing is good enough or your knowledge extensive. Niche sites are great for building blog links networks.

3. Bait your blog. Post unconventional and controversial articles to create lengthy threads that, in turn, create site stickiness.

2. Be consistent into month two. Keep the tone, style and topicality of your blog consistent for the first two months until spiders get it. Then, you can branch out to peripheral topics to expand reader interest.

1. Network offline. Helpful networking tools include LinkedIn, MeetUp and MyBlogLog. These sites provide real world contacts to simplify and streamline the process of networking. They’re also useful in building beneficial online relationships – not to be overlooked. Also reach out using conferences that are available in your area and abroad.

The keys to building a successful, well-tended blog run the gamut from good content to good contacts, and from credibility to controversy. There are lots of ways to expand your blog community and develop quality rankings at the same time

Once you’ve got all of this down your next steps are to begin monetizing your site.

So, blog.

Despite the plethora of e-books on how to make a million dollars on the Internet (usually overnight), building and launching a successful online enterprise is a risk, rewards don’t happen overnight and the odds are against your success. About 94% of all online businesses fail to achieve profitability, in large measure because these entrepreneurs didn’t manage the risk versus reward equation.

If you’re planning to invest in an online commerce site, read on. There’s a lot more to e-success than you imagined.

Risk Assessment
If you plan to invest a lot of money in an online business, it’s best to assess the possibility of losing that money. What are the risks associated with your particular business model?

For example, too much competition or competition that’s too well established put your investment at risk. If you can’t gain market penetration because you’re competing against nationally known brand names, you’re business won’t thrive without finding a different hook to draw in visitors.

Site development cost is another obvious risk factor. Not only will you pay for site design, copywriting, web hosting and search engine optimization, you’ll also need a number of pricey software programs to provide a secure check-out for buyers, to measure and assess site activity and to track orders, shipments and other back office chores.

Now, if you know something about site design and SEO, you won’t have to spend as much, but you’ll still have to spend something. When you calculate the rough numbers for site development, launch and marketing (SEO) ask yourself if you could afford to lose all of that investment. If you can’t, you need to better manage your risk. Here’s how.

Product Availability
Are your products readily available? Do your suppliers drop ship, that is, handle the shipping for a fee? Are your suppliers reliable and well-established? Are there alternative sources for the same product?

This is an area often overlooked by new site owners planning on that quick million. They hook up with distributors only to discover that the providers are barely getting by themselves. They fold and the owner scrambles to find other, comparable products.

Also, determine price stability. If wholesale prices are creeping up that’s going to cut into your margins and, ultimately, your business’ profitability — its margins.

Product Pricing
The world wide web has been a boon for buyers, creating a highly competitive marketplace. Great for buyers, not so great for new site owners. If you’re selling an exercise treadmill for $499 and your competition has the same product at $399, buyers aren’t going to pay that extra $100 just because you have a more attractive web site.

Your site must be competitive, either beating the competition on price or matching it and delivering additional freebies, as well, e.g. free shipping, a coupon for savings on future purchases or 24/7 customer support — all add-ons that should be a part of your business plan from day 1.

And it’s simple enough to do the research on the prices the market will bear. Just Google the competition to see what they’re selling widgets A, B and C for. If you can’t beat the competition on price, if your margins are just too thin, you’ve encountered a stumbling block — one you must overcome before investing in your online business.

Marketing Costs
If you launch your e-venture but don’t market (advertise) it, how will buyers find you? If your site shows up on page 213 of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), you won’t see any SE-driven site traffic. Search engine users rarely look beyond the first page or two of SERPs. Think about it. Do you?

That means you’re going to have to develop other means to drive traffic to your site. And there are lots of ways to do just that.

You can get some exposure for no or low costs through the proliferation of blogs and other personal sites like myspace.com. You can create an online presence and get some links to your site for little or no investment, but the chances of that traffic actually generating enough revenue for business success are slim and zip. It’s not going to happen, though social sites are useful in increasing the number of visitors to your site.

So, plan on marketing costs. You’ll have them. For example, Google’s Adsense program places contextual links on appropriate sites. You’ve seen them. They say “Ads By Goooogle.” Well, those links cost money and every time someone clicks on one, Google takes some of that business owner’s money. These PPC (pay-per-click) programs can cost anywhere from a nickel a click to several dollars a click depending on the keywords you obtain through bidding.

Order Fulfillment Costs
If you handle your own order fulfillment it won’t cost you anything but time because buyers expect to pay for shipping and handling. That’s not a problem. However, packing up 135 orders everyday takes a lot of time when you do it yourself. So, in your risk versus reward equation, factor in order fulfillment costs.

Many manufacturers have drop shipping programs wherein you capture the order through your site, pass it on to the manufacturer who then actually packs up the order and ships it out with your company logo on the bill of sale.

There are also fulfillment houses — businesses that fill orders on a per unit basis. Do the math to determine if outsourcing order fulfillment works with your business model or if it’s something you’ll have to do — at least for a while.

Tweaking Your Way to Success
No one makes it to profitability right out of the blocks. There’s always some site tweaking and SEO tweaking that takes place after the site’s launch. This tweaking is based on the development of site metrics — numbers that provide information on your site’s performance, or lack thereof.

For example, imagine a site that gets lots of traffic but few sales (a low conversion rate). The problem isn’t SEO because visitors are finding the site just find. However, once they do find the site they don’t make a purchase. It could be anything from the look and feel of the homepage to a lack of visitor confidence in the security of the checkout to difficulties in accessing the right product.

Metrics software will help you determine what’s successful and what isn’t on your site, what’s selling and what isn’t, how most visitors find your site (search engine, site links, paid adverts, etc.), what keywords people are using to find you and so on.

Here’s the essence of managing risk versus reward before you invest in an online business: do as much pre-planning as possible before you launch. And, if you don’t know how to assess your investment risk and/or your competition, hire someone who does. It’s that important.

Factor all costs into your business plan — site design, monthly hosting fees, etc. Then, allow for tweaking time before your site starts showing a profit. Again, it won’t happen overnight despite what all of those “Make a Million on the Net” e-books say. It’s hype.

You won’t be able to eliminate all risks associated with starting an online business but you can tip the risk versus reward equation in your favor with some planning and foresight.

In February, 2006, the US Senate Commerce held hearings in Washington that may well affect your on-line business. And, despite the fact that e-commerce growth out-paces brick-and-mortar, same-store growth by 96% annually (since 2000), no one noticed these important hearings. A short piece in the Wall St. Journal, 68 seconds on the evening news, a sound bite here and there, and the question of maintaining a neutral network faded from public consciousness like Vanilla Ice.

And this is important to our on-line industry!

What is a neutral network?
It’s what we have now.

On today’s Internet, all bits are created equal. No preference is given to one transmission over another. Data moves from place to place in a “best practices” sort of way, but no one receives preferential treatment, right?

Consider this. The pipelines that hook us all together (interconnectivity) can no longer handle the traffic load. Just as there are traffic jams on the highway, there are traffic jams on the Information Super-Highway — and they’re going to get worse.

Throughout the entire history of the Net, data has been delivered on a ‘first-come, first-served’ basis. It’s blind egalitarianism. My byte just as important as yours. Which means, when there’s a data-jam, your jpg of the kids’ birthday party receives equal access to Net facilities as the daily accounts of an overseas bank or Fortune 50 company. Now that’s what the Internet is all about.

What’s the dispute?
Money. Bet you didn’t see that coming. It’s all about money — and lots of it.

With the ever-expanding menu of net services, from video and music downloads to podcasts, the demand for data transmission space is increasing — quickly! Daily. And that brings into play the Economics 101 concept of supply and demand. Where demand is greater than supply, prices rise. And that’s what the owners of the Net’s infrastructure want to happen. A rise in prices.

Content vs. Infrastructure
There are two, distinct branches of the Internet experience. First, there are those companies that provide the nuts-and-bolts infrastructure that makes the net possible. We’re talking telephone companies, cable companies, hybrids and hard-wired companies like Cisco and Intel. These are the investor darlings that provide the means to deliver Internet content.

Then there’s the content side of the experience. Google, Napster, Amazon and a few million other on-line sources of data deliver the stuff that passes through the infrastructure (see above) before showing up on you monitor.

Now, the content people want to keep things just the way they are. The vast majority of these ‘pixel publishers’ want to keep unfettered access for all. The infrastructure guys see dollar signs. They want to change the very heart and soul of the Internet and undercut its raison d’etre.

Preferred Pricing
So, what if the infrastructure companies started offering premium services for a price? What if certain users were given preferential access to transmission services — for a fee? It would be like the commuter fast lanes you see on highways.

This would mean that your jpg would sit stalled for a minute or two (or longer) while the data from the overseas bank zips right through. It’s like cutting in line. You didn’t do it in third grade, you don’t do it now.

But that’s what the Senate Commerce Committee was considering during public hearings in February, 2006. The concept of preferred pricing programs should send shivers down the spine of everyone from Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, to the smallest site owner on the W3.

Death to Preferred Pricing
The reason the Internet has become such a vital, robust part of our professional and personal lives is because it is endlessly innovative. It brings together the collective smarts, creativity and business acumen of the worldwide community. New ideas are developed and implemented in weeks and months, not years.

The Internet is wild. Law enforcement is spotty, black hats are always at the gates, but the Internet dynamic encourages new thinking, new strategies and new ways to expand the economy. (Are you kidding? Google’s per share price went up 100% in fiscal year 2005. You better believe numbers like that have an impact on the economy.)

It’s the wide-open, level playing field that has made the Net such a potent force for innovation and such an important part of the US economy. Preferred pricing would change that level playing field, meaning some other company’s data would receive a faster ride than your equally precious data.

So, Are We Just Going to Take This?
What do you think? There’s just too much at stake here, regardless of what position you play on that level playing field. Webmasters, hosting companies, site owners, content providers — the proposed legislation under consideration must be stopped and the Internet community has the power to do just that.

First, contact your senators and congressional representatives. Send e-mails. Lots of them. Keep the Internet Free. Power to the People!

Second, use your outlets to spread the word. Put up a notice on your home page to Free the Net from the bean counters and link to this article.

It’s not too late to keep the Net out of the hands of Verizon, Comcast and SBC/ATT and keep it open for the little guys hatching the next Google in their garage right now.

Free the Net!