How I Pimped My Blog

We only have a few seconds for our blog visitors to decide to stay or go, so your blog had better look sharp.

Need a few ideas about how to do that? Read on, because…

I have 2 suggestions for you today.

And I’ve just used both of them on my blog at http://www.SydneyWorldMasters.com

WHAT IS THE SYDNEY WORLD MASTERS, ANYWAY?

In case you are not familiar with the World Masters, it’s like the Olympic Games but it’s for older people.

Actually the Masters Games attract more participants than the Olympics, according to the reports. Personally I found that quite surprising. It certainly doesn’t attract the same level of sponsorship or television time but it does involve more people. And that’s great to see.

As our population ages, my hunch is that we’re going to hear more and more about the Masters Games.

Anyhow, because we live in Sydney and are not as young as we once were (nudge nudge, wink wink), my wife and I figured that setting up a blog about the Sydney World Masters would be a neat thing to do.

PIMPING THE BLOG

That is a funny term, isn’t it? Pimping. Making it prettier, of course.

I’ve done two things to make the blog look better.

1) Template.

Of course, there are thousands of free WordPress templates out there. Just search in Google for ‘free wordpress themes’ and you’ll find them.

Now some of them might look sharp and attention grabbing but they are not very well done in terms of SEO (search engine optimization). And by that I mean if you look at the source code you will often see a lack of H1 and H2 tags or more likely an excess of them – including the wrong things being tagged with those heading meta tags. If trivial content is tagged as with H2 or even H3, that gives misleading info to the search engines – and you can pay a penalty.

So these days one of the first things I do when seriously considering a new WP theme is to look at the source code and see if the titles of each new blog post are set in H2 tag. The title of the blog itself should be set in H1 tag (with H1 being more important than H2). Of course, when you are setting up your blog you would want to be sure that you put a keyword in the blog title, so it comes out in H1 tag – telling the search engine spiders in no uncertain terms that this keyword is what the blog is all about.

If you visit my blog and scroll to the very bottom, the theme link will take you to the download page for the SEOAdMax theme which I am using.

If you examine the source code, you’ll see there is one H1 tag and that the title of each post set with the H2 tag. Just as it should be. Nice.

2) Image ads.

Rather than leave a lot of Adsense text ads there, as per the original SEOAdMax template, I have replaced most of the ad blocks with “image + text ads” that promote high paying ClickBank products. The ads come from a free service I found recently and if you are interested in raising your EPC (earnings per click), you might also like to take a look at it.

There is a wide range of options including all the usual display sizes and colours. But what I really like is that they offer images for all the ClickBank products.

Or you can go with text-only ads. Incidentally these are displayed in a bigger bolder font than Google uses (and they are not context sensitive) which are two points that distinguish them from Google ads. In other words, these ads stand out… which is what you’d want since ClickBank ads typically pay you many dollars per sale… compared to the cents per click that Google pays.

ACTION STEP

Click here http://garyharvey.net/links/cbads to put ClickBank image ads on all your sites, for FREE. Upgrade later, when you’re happy with it. That’s what I did, and I’m now using these image+text ads on all my sites now – and loving it.

Put Image Ads On Your Site For Free – http://garyharvey.net/links/cbads

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Article by Gary Harvey.

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