Hello all digitalpointers, my name is Ryan and I have half-started a cycling blog. I have a few questions to ask and I would be extremely grateful to anyone willing to answer. The blog I have set up is a wordpress blog. I am using a free hosting service called byethost. Right now I have no posts and I have not reallly done much to the site. The reason for this is that I want my blog to have a .co.uk domain. Would I be able to do this using the free hosting? I intend to use a small number of google ads on my site. I know how to install those but I do not know how to get my site into the search engines? If I use a .tk domain will it be harder to promote in search engines? Could someone give me a few tips on how to get visitors who are interested in cycling, not just a mass of hits. Could someone tell me the legal requirements of putting pictures that I do not own on my blog eg - aknowledging source. Could someone explain tags and what they do? Any other random tips and advice will be graciously accepted
If you are using free hosting, then your url is just about always going to need to include their domain. If you are serious about blogging, it is advised to purchase your own domain name and self host it. For getting targeted traffic interested in cycling, you should locate some other cycling blogs and comment on posts. Make meaningful contributions and start to establish yourself as a cycling authority. Then more people will want to see what you have to say on your own blog. Also, look for some cycling forums and participate in the discussions there. These strategies are good for both authority building and backlinks. If you're new to SEO, spend some time learning basic linkbuilding strategies. There are plenty of great threads here at DP that will get you going. For images, anything that you find on the web that you didn't take yourself is copyrighted and you can't use it without permission from the copyright holder, even if you acknowledge the source. You can search for free stock images or images listed under creative commons licenses and see the terms that the owner provides. There are tons of questions like this in the "Legal Issues" DP forum so you might want to spend some time reading old threads there. Best of luck with blogging!
Do some link exchange, article marketing with the backlinks in you articles, Google optimization. The Google analytics tool will help you to track the sources of traffic and build up your strategies based on the traffic sources. Best of luck!
Good answers by ajwalsh...I'd like to add: Tags, in the sense of posting, tags (and categories) help you categorize your content. Then you can display a list of posts by tag, category etc and there are a ton of other things you can do with tags and categories. Generally a tag is something that an article contains, where a category is what it is about. Eg, you might have an article about mc donalds, your category could be fast food and the tags big mac, chocolate thick shakes, heart attacks Images, try http://www.sxc.hu/ and http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ they are both good. Make sure you read the license before using however. Why would you use .tk? That is a country level tld for Tokelau If you use this you will struggle with SEO, except for in Tokelau of course Get your .co.uk domain if you can. Just remember this makes it easier to rank in uk search engines but can be harder outside of UK. As for hosting...Buy some...godaddy offer cheap hosting which would be sufficient for a small blog and there are lots and lots of others! You could get hosting for under $50 per year if you look hard enough. Other random tips?? If you want to monetize, analyse your market and research your keywords. I imagine cycling may have some serious competition, so think about what you can offer than your competition can't and how you can entice your visitors to make you money.
get link exchange would be a good idea to get backlink and traffic back. see http://blog.backlinkdofollow.com/linkexchange
Yes, I think having your own domain is more beneficial. The readers will most likely be able to memorize or remember it. And it won’t cost you that much, Godaddy always has a discount or low priced domains.