SkipRatt mountain bike blog

Starting a new website can be an extremely difficult and daunting task to accomplish for beginners. Unless your paying for web design you’ll need to gain at least a basic grasp of HTML, CSS and even PHP dependent on what type of site you are building, this will also usually be the case if your using pre-designed templates as you will still have to add your content and you’ll often need to change things around to get your site looking just how you want it. But probably the most difficult thing that beginners find hardest to get an understanding of is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

This is a subject that creates huge debate on the internet and with many authorities seemingly having differing views this can lead to some confusion to the newbie. In truth, SEO can give even the most experienced of webmasters a headache at times. Applying good SEO practice is not as difficult as it first seems, there are simple things that you can do to start off with that will give your website a good foundation for the future. Read post for 5 Simple SEO Tips For Beginners

For every article you write on your blog or website write two similar articles using the same keywords and submit them to article directories, have each article linking to your home page using your keyword in the anchor text and also the article.
This will get you important back links to your site with well optimized anchor text.

This method of building niche sites has been working well for many niche marketers, just how many articles you’ll need until you reach the 1st page of results in Google will depend on how competitive the keyword is. Start with 10 articles and then keep increasing the amount of content each month until your rankings improve.

There are many ways to make money on the internet by building and maintaining your own websites but there are generally two ways in which you can go, authority sites or niche sites. Building an authority site can take an incredible amount of hard work and dedication. It will also take you time, I would say as a general rule two to three years is pretty normal. You’ll likely find it hard to make money with these types of sites in the beginning but once they do hit there prime you can look forward to making a decent amount of passive income in the future. Not all of us have got either the time or the inclination to build an authority site which leads us to our other option, niche marketing.

Niche marketing is simply the process of homing in on narrower niches in order to build your sites around. Instead of having one large authority site niche marketers tend to have many small niche sites, some have hundreds of these types of sites. In order to build a successful niche site you need to find keywords or phrases that are reasonably well searched but have a pretty low level of competition. Once this type of site is set-up in general you’ll not be aiming to make big money from it but instead maybe $4-$5 dollars per day on average. Once it is built it is left alone and you move on to build your next niche site only going back to add content now and again. It is much easier to make $4-$5 dollars per day from a site than it is to make $100-$200 dollars per day and you can often expect to hit your target in a reasonable amount of time.

The most search engine friendly blog platform to use is WordPress which you can download from WordPress.org for free. If you get web hosting through Hostgator or Dreamhost you’ll be able to install WordPress using Fantastico’s one click install meaning you’ll be ready to go in seconds. Assuming you have taken my advice and set-up a WordPress blog on your own domain you’ll also need to install some plugins and change your permalink structure to make your site more search engine friendly. Changing your permalink structure is very simple, just go to options, then permalinks. From there add /%postname%/ into the “custom structure” field and select “Update Permalink Structure”.

The most important plugins to install to make your WordPress blog search engine friendly are the All In One SEO Pack (Generate search engine friendly page titles, adds keyword and descr i ption meta tags), Google XML Sitemaps (Generates an XML sitemap which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo), Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (Generates a fully customizable HTML sitemap) and Similar Posts (Adds similar posts to your posts pages helping spread link popularity).

Once your blog and has been set-up to be SEO friendly you’ll now be ready to start writing your posts. It’s important to decide what the main keywords are that you want to focus on targeting. Try not to focus on more than 2-3 general topics (keywords) and develop a list of more focused keywords or keyphrases related to your topics. You can use a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker to help you with this. Once you have developed a nice list of keywords that you want to target you can start writing posts incorporating these keywords, in the titles and within the posts body. Over time with more and more posts you will be building keyword authority for these keywords. It is also a good idea linking all your pages back to your home page using your blogs main keyword as the anchor text. I accomplish this by adding the link to my blogs footer.

Content Is King
This statement is banded about time and time again. This is for good reason, as search engines become more and more efficient at bringing the most relevant and resourceful web pages to the top of the SERPS it is becoming increasingly important to produce content for your websites that offer quality to readers. Also, by producing quality content from the start you’ll have a better chance of gaining links to your website naturally, as your reputation for producing high quality and relevant content within your niche increases other webmasters will be eager to link to you.

Stay On Topic
This is so important and a mistake made by many webmasters and especially bloggers. Take your time before you start your website to plan exactly what topic your website will be focused on. When you start writing articles for your website try and stay as on topic as possible. You don’t need to have tunnel vision but try to make sure that each article can at least be somewhat related to the main theme of your website.

On-Site Optimization
Optimizing your website is important but you need to take great care not to over do it. Keep things as simple as possible. Use relevant keywords in your page title and header tags. You will also need to use the keywords that your targeting within the body of your articles but don’t over do it or else your pages could get penalized for keyword stuffing. Adding your most important keyword or keyphrase in the first and last paragraph is in general all you need. Sprinkle various synonyms and related phrases or keywords through the rest of the article to ensure the search engines categorize your web pages correctly.

Off-Site Optimization
This generally covers link building and you’ll need to tackle this with care as over promoting your site can result in penalization by the search engines. They want websites who are building links naturally and will reward those that seem to be following their guidelines. There are many methods you can use to build link popularity such as web directory submissions and article marketing, just make sure to vary your anchor link text and try to be consistent with the number of links your obtaining as this will make your link building efforts look much more natural.

Check Out The Competition.
Keeping track of what your competition is up to in your chosen niche is a very worthwhile exercise. Take time to study them, if they are on top of the search results for the keywords your targeting you will want to know why. This can help you formulate a plan to help you compete with them, whatever they are doing good, you need to discover it and do it even better.

If there is one thing we can count on in life it is where there are people involved there will also be myths. We humans have an inbuilt desire to find patterns in whatever we do. This skill has proven a great advantage to us over the course of time but unfortunately for us it can also create problems. The thing is with humans and patterns, if we can’t find a pattern that we recognize or that makes sense to us we are experts at creating our own. This is especially true in the case of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Our desires to find patterns to help us rank higher in the search engines knows no bounds, obviously in the past and the present this has helped us to learn methods to improve our performance in the search engines using both “Black Hat and “White Hat” methods. The spin off from this is that it has also helped us to create and invent SEO myths, some are more believable and others are just outright crazy. Whilst searching the webmaster forums and various SEO blogs you’ll often come across some mad ideas, some of them so stupid it makes me wonder if some people make up some of this rubbish just to gain the attention.

With the low cost of domain names and shared hosting anybody can set-up a website and claim their own piece of the internet real estate. You can optimize your site reasonably well yourself without a great deal of advanced knowledge just by getting the basic fundamentals right. Anybody can start there own website and build a successful online presence as long as they remember it takes time and effort. The first place most new webmasters will start there research in order to gain knowledge of how to get their sites ranking in the search engines for their specific keywords are popular webmaster forums and “how to” type SEO sites and blogs. A very popular breeding ground for SEO myths.

When you start trawling the forums it is very easy to start taking everything you read as the word of god, especially true if you’re an inexperienced webmaster just starting out. It’s important for you to understand that forums are a breeding ground for incorrect information and myths. Most of the time these inaccuracies will eventually be pointed out by someone more knowledgeable but if you’re the newbie that reads this information before the inaccuracies have been corrected then you could be absorbing information that is inaccurate and sometimes even laughable.

You’ll often come across stuff that is just down right hilarious such as, SEO is quick, SEO can only be mastered by highly intelligent people, SEO guarantees you’ll rank number one, Google has a vendetta against me, Google is the only search engine, you will not get caught for spamming, people on forums are SEO experts, hidden text is ok because it works, it is easy to distinguish Black Hat SEO from White Hat SEO. These are just examples that I came across recently. There are many SEO myths around the internet, some more believable than others. Just remember not to take everything you read as fact as this isn’t always the case.

Niche marketers have their own methods of building niche sites, some prefer static websites others prefer blogs. Personally I prefer blogs because the aim is to build these sites as quickly as possible and then set and forget them. When you need to update them you can do so very quickly and easily with blogs. To give you a better understanding of how this works I will tell you a method that is working great for many niche marketers at the moment.

First you need to choose a low competition but pretty well searched keyword. You can find possible keywords using keyword research tools. To check the competition type the keyword in Google search using quotes. For example if you wanted to check niche marketing you would type “niche marketing” into Google. I recommend you look for competition of less than 1,000,000 competing pages. The more competition the longer it will take you to rank on the first page of the search results.

Once you have chosen your keyword you’ll then need to set-up your blog using the keyword in the blog name. You can use Blogger.com to start off with to gain experience and confidence but once you get more confident move on and start building the rest of your niche sites with a self hosted WordPress blog, these offer more flexibility and also perform very well in the search engines. You need to add content to these niche blogs, each article will need to be closely related to your targeted keyword, try and use this keyword a couple of times in each article and link each article using your keyword in the anchor text to your homepage.

Search engine optimization for a blog is generally different from your normal run of the mill website but it is also very important that bloggers get the fundamentals of SEO right if they want to target free organic traffic from the search engines. Blogs are social in nature which enables them to build links more naturally than a static website. Writing one very popular post can create hundreds or even thousands of links for your site in a very short space of time, getting this kind of popularity is naturally more difficult with a static website. A large portion of people who read blogs also write them as well.

If you write quality unique content on your blog and are able to generate fresh ideas related to hot topics of the moment then the links you can obtain can help boost your sites SEO by itself. But like I said it is also important to get the fundamentals right as well. If you’re on a free hosted blog with the likes of Blogger.com or WordPress.com then I highly recommend you make the small investment of establishing you own self hosted blog with its own domain. You can purchase a domain name from GoDaddy.com for less than $10 and you can get shared web hosting for your blog for less than $10 per month from the like of hostgator.com or Dreamhost.com. If you haven’t got the option of hosting your own then stick with Blogger.com, at least then you’ll be able to make some money in the future as they allow Adsense and affiliate links.

Here is a list of mountain bike manufacturers in one place for easy reference. If you feel that I have missed a manufacturer that should be placed on this list, please contact me by leaving a comment.

Marzocchi Fox Mojo AeroSpoke Amp Bianchi Bontrager Cannondale Geax GT Gary Fisher Hayes Disc Brakes Head Shok Intense

Kona Litespeed Marin Mavic Maxxis Mongoose Norco Panaracer Raceface Ritchey Rock Shox Rocky Mountain

Schwinn Shimano Specialized Spinergy Sram Sun/Ringle Syncros Ti Cycles Tektro Systems Trek Topeak Velocity Wellgo Zipp

The Grantham area host local bike rides, and charity events. We also have a local cycle club in the area too! In this post I am going to highlight these events and clubs in a form of a list, and give you their website for more details.
If you know of any other events or cycle clubs in the Grantham area that you think should be on the list. Please leave a comment with the details and a website URL, if available.

Charity events & bike rides

Hearts Vale of Belvoir, an event held in May.

The viking challenge, an event held in October.


Cycle/bike clubs

Witham Wheelers

If your looking for a nice compiled list of free submission services then this might be what you need. I have included blog directory submission services, all of which are free but may require registration. Also included in the list is some free RSS submission services for you to submit to. If you know of any more free services like these, please leave a comment with the services URL so I can add it to the list asap..

Blog directories 1)www.blogexplosion.com 2) www.bloggernity.com 3) www.topblogarea.com 4) www.bloghub.com 5) www.blogrankings.com 6) www.lsblogs.com 7) www.weblogalot.com 8) www.blogdirs.com 9) www.bloggapedia.com 10)www.blogcatalog.com 11)www.blogpulse.com 12)www.blogged.com 13)dir.blogflux.com/ 14)www.globeofblogs.com 15)www.bloghop.com 16)www.blogexplosion.com 17)www.bloggernity.com 18)www.topblogarea.com 19)portal.eatonweb.com 20)www.bloghub.com 21)www.blogrankings.com 22)www.lsblogs.com 23)www.weblogalot.com 24)www.blogs-collection.com 25)www.blog-directory.org 26)www.mynewblog.net 27)www.5starblogs.com 28)www.bloglinker.com 29)www.blogadr.com 30)www.blogdire.com 31)www.blogpoint.com 32)www.quickblogdirectory.com 33)www.blogbunch.com 34)www.wilsdomain.com

RSS submission 1)RSS feeds 2)GoldenFeed 3)RSSMicro 4)FeedDirectory 5)Octora RSS Feeds 6)FeedFury 7)RSSMotron 8)FindRSS 9)FeedBase 10)RSSMotron 11)Day Time News 12)RSSBuffet 13)SolarWarp 14)Feedest 15)RSSMicro 16)FeedBees.com 17)RSS Mountain 18)FeedSee