Best Web Site Hosting- How To Choose The Best Web Host For You
April 1, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Website Flipping
Finding the best web site hosting plan for your business can be confusing, but if your business is going to be involved on the internet in any serious capacity, one of the most important decisions you will need to make is choosing a hosting provider. Choosing the best one is not as important as NOT choosing the wrong one. Speaking from years of experience, the wrong hosting provider can be a nightmare, especially if you have other clients that depend on you.
Choosing the right host is mostly a matter of doing a little research and asking the right questions. You may be looking for the best rated web hosting company to work with, but here’s a secret….there is no “best” host out there. That’s because everyone’s circumstances are different and change over time and therefore require different things at different times. But there are a lot of very good hosts out there to choose from. Which one is “best” will depend on your situation. I will give you my opinions of the best web site hosting companies based on my experience at the end of this article.
Note: Although I mainly focus my discussion on Internet marketing, the points I make will apply to basically any business that is going online.
1. Price - You get what you pay for
Although for most people starting in internet marketing price is a big consideration, price should not be the only determining factor. Your time, not to mention your sanity, has price. The good news is that many of the good hosts out there are all in the same range and offer most of the same basic features. As I write this I would say that you should expect to pay about $8-$10.00 per month for web hosting. There are some that charge in the $3-$5 per month range, but I would tend to stay away from those, as they are usually not as reliable and more restrictive in their options. The extra couple of dollars a month is well worth it.
And remember, that even though the costs are low, that doesn’t diminish the fact that this is a very important business decision. If you choose the wrong host and need to switch down the road, it can take days or weeks of time to move your site(s) over, depending on how many you have. So don’t think that just because it only $10.00 per month that this should be taken lightly. I have been doing this for over 9 years, and have made my share of bad hosting decisions over that time. So use my experience to avoid making the same mistakes.
2. Features - What’s in it for me?
Once you figure out what you want to pay, now it is time to start looking at the features each host offers. Most web hosting companies offer multiple plans. For instance, Hostgator offers 3 basic plans, Hatchling, Baby, and Business available in either Windows or Linux web site hosting (I’ll discuss those in another article). Each level offers many of the same features, but they each have their differences.
Hostgator Comparison Chart (example)
Below are comparisons of different basic Hostgator plans. These are only a partial list of features, to show where they differ. All other features are the same, so I didn’t think you needed to see that here. See the full list of features here.
The first thing you should notice is the prices. All pretty good. The Hatchling price looks great until you start looking at features. The big problem with this package is that it only allows you to host 1 domain. That is great if that is all you will ever do, but it is unlikely in most cases, especially if you are going to be in online marketing. You will be much better off with either of the other two packages that offer “unlimited” domains. In theory, that means you can host as many domains as you would like.
With most FTP features, like anonymous FTP, you won’t really need to worry about them unless you have a specific reason to. And if you have a specifc reason you, you should already know what you need.
Addon / parked domains are only important if you are planning on parking your domain pages.
Sub Domains come in handy sometimes but are not critical
FTP accounts really only get used if you will have other people accessing the web server files.
This last image shows a couple of interesting things. The first thing to look at is the $2.00 / monthly for the dedicated IP. This is not an option, this is automatically included, which makes the actual price of the package $9.95 per month. I think they could have done this a little differently, as it is kind of a cheesey way of being able to show a more competitive price, but it must work for them. Anyway, just be aware of that if you go with them.
The “Toll free number” and “private SSL” are only going to be useful if you have an online store where you will be selling products, or you will want people to be able to call you. This is not the case with most online marketers, so the extra $3.00 expense is typically not worth it.
I am not singling out Hostgator as the one you should go with, but they are one that you should seriously consider. They are one of the most popular hosts among internet marketers for a reason.
3. Reputation - What’s the word on the street?
As with any business decision you need to do your homework. The problem with trying to find reviews of web hosts on the web is that all of “review” sites out there are just affiliate sites, with no true information on them. They will list 10 sites, with a feature comparison chart, and whichever one pays the highest commissions is the one they list as best. You really have to dig to find any real information from real people. Plan on looking for about an hour.
Obviously you can’t trust the testimonial on the actual web hosts site. They could be just cherry picking the best ones and not showing the negative ones, or they could be fake (gasp!).
You could try someone like the Better Business Bureau (BBB), but personally I wouldn’t trust them either.
What you are really looking for are blogs where you have real people praising the good and complaining about the bad. Remember, every host will have bad reviews. I don’t care how good they are. Some people just like to bitch and moan, and typically they are the ones that like to vent.
I used to own a ColdStone Creamery, and one of the things I told my employees is that a customer that gets good service may tell 1 other person about it, but a customer that gets bad service will tell 20 people. It is just the way things are.
Without being able to hear both sides of the story, it is hard to know what the truth is. Granted, some people just have a bad experience. They have a perfect storm of circumstances and everything goes wrong. But some people make things worse than they need to be and no matter what you do you can’t make them happy. These are usually the people that complain the loudest.
My point is, if you are able to find a discussion about a particular webhost, you should weigh the good comments heavier than the bad in most cases. If there are nothing but bad comments, then the host is probably bad. If they are pretty equal, then the host is probably pretty good. If they are mostly good, they they are probably excellent.
4. Customer Support - Help! I need somebody…
This goes right along with the number 3 above. A hosts customer support are the front lines of their business. If their customer service sucks, you will want to leave, and tell everyone about it. If their customer service is good, you will probably rarely ever need to speak with them, and will probably never mention it to anyone.
Unfortunately this is only information you can get beforehand from comments and discussions. But good customer service is vitally important to your mental well being and your business (in that order). Not that it is critical, but having a customer service rep that speaks your language (natively) makes a huge difference. I don’t mean to sound xenophobic, but trying to solve a crisis is not the time to try and tackle a language barrier as well. It does nothing but make the CS rep frustrated with you and make you angry at the them.
5. Growing old together? - Scalability
If you are just starting out, then this isn’t going to be a major factor, but it should be in the back of your mind. Depending on how big you get (or are planning on getting) you will want a web host that will grow with you. This mainly has to do with the amount of traffic you have coming to your site. Most sites will be just fine with the “unlimited” amount of bandwidth most hosts offer. But once you get up to 10K or more visits per day , you will find out that “unlimited” is not as infinite as it may sound. You will start getting charged with “exceeding your bandwidth” charges. At that point it will be time to scale up, possibly to a dedicated server. But for the vast majority of internet and affiliate marketing people out there, this is not something you will need to worry about for a long time.
So who do I recommend?
I currently use several different hosts for my various network marketing ventures. If you are serious about internet marketing you are going to want to have several web hosting accounts for SEO purposes. Based on my experience, or the experiences of other internet marketers, here are the web hosts I recommend and the ones I don’t.
Highly Recommended
HostGator
Good Price, pretty good service, good variety of plans, very good control panel, great reputation
GoDaddy
Good price, pretty good service, good variety of plans, good reliability, great reputation
HostMonster
Good price, pretty good service, good reliability, good variety of plans available
Mosso
High price, excellent service, excellent reliability and scalability
(only recommended for larger clients)
Recommended
1&1 Web Hosting
very good prices, good plan options, good tools and extras, not great service
(if they ever fix their customer service, I would move 1&1 up to highly recommended)
SuperGreen Hosting
Very good prices, only 1 plan offered, good extra features, so-so service
Not Recommended
Network Solutions
high price, good reliability, mediocre service, bad control panel
Just Host
good price, questionable reliability, poor service
FatCow
good price, questionable reliability, poor service
Inmotion
good price, questionable reliability, poor service
Bluehost
good price, ok reliablity, poor service
If you have had any experiences with these hosts or any other, please leave a comment so others can gain some insight from your experience.
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Get The Insiders Guide To CPA Marketing Profits FREE- CPA Report
March 27, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Adwords & PPC, CPA Secrets
If you are interested in getting into promoting CPA (Click Per Action) offers, then fill in your email address below and I will send you a link to a FREE 89 page CPA report written by one of the top CPA marketers, Gauher Chaudhry.
Gauher is the creator of Pay Per Click Formula and has been around since the beginning of internet marketing. I have gotten a lot out of talking to him over the years. His methods are solid and his ideas on mobile marketing are right on the cutting edge.
This report has a lot of good information CPA marketing and I highly recommend it. It covers everything from:
- What are CPA offers
- Landing pages
- Traffic tactics
- Ad copy strategies
- Testing and tracking
and a lot more.
As I said before, its free, so you have no reason not to get it. So just fill in your email address below and I will send you a link where you can get Gauher’s Free Report “The Insider’s Guide TO CPA Marketing Profits”.
15 Twitter Tricks - Get The Most Tweet In Your Twitter Posts
March 23, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Social Marketing
One of the things that makes twitter so great is also one of the things that makes it frustrating to use. Having only 140 characters to post your daily (or hourly) thoughts can be aggravating, if what you have to say takes 145. Re-tweeting adds to this challenge by stealing away some of your precious character resources.
For the uninitiated, re-tweeting is when you forward a post from another user to all of your followers. It usually begins with something like this: "RT @twittername". Re-tweets will usually force you to use all 140 characters, also known as a twoosh, and get you to try to figure out how bad your grammar can be and still make sense.
Here are a 15 Twitter tricks to use for your tweets, particularly re-tweets, that will still allow your twoosh to be comprehendible.
Beginner tricks:
Contractions: take two words and combine them into one word. For instance "it is" becomes "it’s", or "can not" becomes "can’t". Remember this is not English class, so feel free to drop the apostrophe (i.e. cant, its).
Don’t use "and": The word "and" can always become "&" or "+". That gives you two more characters to use.
Words you don’t need: As stated before, the rules of proper grammar do not apply when tweeting, feel free to drop words such as "the", "an", and other similar words.
Remember License Plates: when doing your tweets, try to imagine how you might write if you were trying to write it on a license plate. People get very creative when trying to figure out what they want to say in a very limited space. "Wonderful" may be written "1drfl", or as another example, if you’re old enough to remember the Van-Hargar album "OU812". You have to be careful not to make them to cryptic.
Numbered your Words: related to the above example, you can use numbers and place of words. For becomes "4", "to" becomes "2", and so on.
Dead space: be sure to take out any extra spaces that are necessary, as these are counted as part of your 140 characters.
Novice tricks:
Drop vowels: in some cases, not all, you can drop the vowels from a word, thereby saving yourself a few extra letters. For example "bathroom" can become "bthrm". Just try to make sure that the words are still readable. If you have ever tried to write a real estate newspaper ad in a very limited space, you’ll understand.
Remove pronouns: words like "that", "this", and "their" can be dropped in many instances.
Pluck out the "i": (sorry for the graphic pun, but I thought it was funny) By removing the letter "i" from your posts occasionally, your post can be a little shorter, and make more of a statement.
Symbolism: don’t forget about using symbols in place of words. For instance, use "=" instead of "equals", "number" becomes "#", and "percent" becomes "%".
Shorten words: we do this all the time but sometimes it gets forgotten. Use "w/" for "with", "w/o" for "without", and "love" becomes "luv".
Common Acronyms: there are certain terms that become popular online overtime. They usually start in online games, chat rooms, or texting, then quickly spread into the common vernacular. Some of the current most popular are: "OMG", "LOL", "WTF", "n00b" Sometimes you can even combine the abbreviations, for instance you can combine "OMG" and "WTF" into "OMFG".
Here is a larger list of other online acronyms you can use. But be warned, unless you are writing for a teenage audience, most of these may not make any sense.
http://www.sharpened.net/glossary/acronyms.php
Professional Tricks:
Rewriting Tweets: If you can shorten a tweet by rewriting it and not changing its meaning or intent, then feel free. The people you send it to will be grateful.
Don’t Multi Re-Tweet: It is obviously great to give credit where credit is due, but when Re-Tweeting, just use the original poster, not everyone that has sent it along its way.
Smaller links: Twitter will sometimes short links automatically for you, but you can also use services like bit.ly to give yourself a little more control and squeeze every last character into your tweet.
Please leave me a comment and let me know if this was useful.
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Keyword Research: Find The Best Keywords With Free Research Tools
March 23, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Keyword Research
Keyword Research: What You Need To Know About Keyword Research
Keyword research is the most important aspect when deciding which are going to be writing about. Of course you can writes about things that you are interested in, but if you are concerned about being ranked in Google, then keywords is where your initial focus needs to be.
Why is keyword research so important? Well, because when somebody does a search in Google, or any of the search engines for that matter, what they type in the search box is what the search engines are going to be looking for. So if your page and your content do not relate to what they are searching for, you page will not come up in the results. Remember, relevancy it key.
So what kind of keywords should you go after? Basically what you’re looking for are the keywords that you have a chance of ranking for and have a decent amount of traffic. Just because a keyword gets a lot of traffic, especially because of traffic, doesn’t mean that is a word you should be going after. What it usually means is that it is going to make it harder to be able to rank decently for that keyword.
For instance, take words like “shoes”, “insurance”, “lawyer”, “dentist”. All of those get a tremendous amount of traffic, but there are two problems with them.
- There is so much competition for them, it would take years to be able to rank for them.
- They are not “buying” words. They do not show that the searcher is far enough down in the buying cycle to be really serious about buying something.
You are better off to go after long tail, or not as popular, keywords when you are trying to write your articles. Long tail keywords are generally words that have 3 to 8 words in them. The benefits of long tail keywords is that:
- There is generally less competition
- They show more of an intent to buy
The big downside to long tail keywords is that they don’t get as much traffic.
So for example, a keyword like “shoes” may be get difficult to rank for but “red shoes in North Dakota” may be quite a bit easier. It may get a lot less traffic, but on the other hand it is something you may be able to actually rank fairly high for.
I’ll will put it this way:
it’s better to be ranked higher for a low traffic keyword and get some traffic, than to be ranked lower for a high-traffic keyword and get no traffic.
So how do you start keyword research
Well there are a lot of tools out there to help you with your keyword research. The three that I’ve found work best are these:
All three of these are free and all of them worked very well for your initial keyword research. As you get more proficient and start earning more you can go and get paid tools, even if the paid don’t do that much more for you. I still use all of these free tools even though I have tools that I pay for as well.
The Problem With Tools
The problem with any keyword tool is that all they are really giving you are estimates. They all look at different places and at different times. What they are all they’re doing is trying to guess how much traffic a particular keyword is actually getting. That is why using multiple tools for your keyword research is the safest way to begin. But you still have to use your brain to be able decide what the best keywords are going to be. There is no better tool than the one between your ears. You’ll learn this over time and will become more and more natural to you, but at first it may be a little confusing.
Basically you need to take any of the numbers that they give you with a grain of salt because you will often see wide differences in the amount of searches that they all predict. Sometimes they are pretty close, but most times they are vastly different.
How To Analyze your Keywords
There are two aspects that you need to look at when analyzing your keyword. The first is how many people are actually looking for that term (search volume). The other aspect is competition for that keyword. If there is too much competition, you will have a very hard time trying to rank for that particular keyword.
Here is the system that I follow when doing my keyword research.
First open up a browser that supports tabs, either Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 or 8, or Opera.
Open up four tabs
(if you are using any of the above browsers, just click on the links and they should open in new tabs automatically)
Tab #1: Google’s Keyword Tool
Tab #2: Wordtracker Free Tool
Tab #3: Keyword Discovery
Tab #4: Google Search Page
If you are logged into Google with iGoogle or something like that, you will want to log out, because your results may be skewed otherwise.
Go to your first tab (Google Keyword Tool) and type in your initial keyword (whatever it is you want to rank for). For this example we will start with the word “shoes”. Type in the Captcha and click on GET KEYWORD IDEAS. The initial results look like this:
There are some setting you will want to change. Up above the results is a dropdown box that says “Choose columns to display”. You want to make sure that you have “Show Estimated Average CPC” showing in your results
Your results should now look like this
The next thing you want to do is to sort your results by “Approx Avg Search Volume”. You do this by clicking on it at the top.
Now your results look like this
Depending on what your goals are and how you are planning on monetizing your page, the important columns you will be looking at will be different. If you are looking at monetizing strictly with Adsense, then you want to look at the “Estimated CPC”, “Advertiser Competition”, and “Aproximate Avg Search Volume”. If you are going to be doing affiliate marketing (not PPC) then you are mainly concerned with “Advertiser Competition” and “Aproximate Avg Search Volume”.
When researching for Adsense, here are a couple rules of thumb.
- Your average CPC should be a minimum of .75. Remember that Adsense only pays you a portion of what they are getting, so you want this number to be as high as possible to have the best chance of making the most money.
- Advertiser competition should be has high as possible. They higher the advertiser competition, the more likely it is that the Estimated CPC will be accurate. The lower the competition, the lower the actual estimated CPC will be, regardless of what it shows in the results. You will learn that with experience.
If you are doing affiliate marketing, then the Avg CPC really doesn’t make much difference to you. You just want to make sure that the advertiser competition is high, because that tells you that there is some money in it. If there are a lot of people bidding on a keyword, there must be money to be made. Keep in mind that what Google shows you is not always accurate. Later I will show you another trick so you can check how accurate the Advertiser Competition really is.
Here is another rule of thumb I use when doing quick keyword research. I only look at keywords with Average Monthly Search Results less than 18,000. I have found, in general, that these will be the words I will have the best chance of ranking for. Remember this is a rule of thumb and not an ABSOLUTE rule. There are many exceptions to this rule that you can find if you look long enough. However, in this guide, we are focusing on FAST keyword research. After you learn this, you can take as much time as you like.
OK, so here’s one we can try that looks pretty good.
It is kind of long tail (3 words), has a CPC of over .75 (.95), has good amount of advertiser competition, and good search volume.
Now we will look at WordTracker
Looks like it has pretty good search volume (remember that WordTracker shows DAILY results)
It also looks like there are a number of other keywords that may be worth looking at as well. We will want to make note of them to research later.
Next we will look at Keyword Discovery and see what their results say.
It looks like we have a winner so far. We also notice that some of the same results are coming up in Keyword Discovery that were just in WordTracker. Again, we want to make note of that fact for later.
Well our research so far has shown us that this keyword is definitely a possibility, so we can keep going. If our results in WordTracker or Keyword Discovery had shown 0 or 1 results, we would probably want to start over with another keyword.
Next we go to Google. As I said before, if you have an iGoogle Account, you will want to log out of it first.
What you need to do now is to type into the search box, your keyword surrounded by quotes, like so:
“name brand shoes”
What you will be looking at is in the top right hand corner and will look something like this.
What we see here is that there are 386,000 other sites competing directly for this term. Here is another rule of thumb. What you are looking for are results less than 20,000 competing pages. Anything more than that and you will have a hard time trying to rank. You want this number to be as low as possible.
So looking at this, we have found out that this is not a good keyword to try and rank for. But remember the other terms we ran across earlier. We can try one of those. Lets try “discount name brand shoes” and see what happens.
Looks like we have a winner. Only 15,300 competing pages. And from our previous research we already know that it is a term that people are searching for. We could go back and double check in the Google Keyword tool, but it is probably not necessary.
Ok remember earlier I said I was going to show you a little trick to make sure the numbers Google was giving you were accurate. Here is what you do. Down at the bottom of the PPC ads on the right, there should be a link that says “More Sponsored Results”.
If it is not there that means that there are less than 10 people competing for that keyword, which is a bad sign. If it is there, click on it and see how many people are actually competing.
Ideally you want to see as many as possible, but anything over 20 is great.
So our first round of research was a success. We found a keyword with commercial intent that we should be able to rank for. Now all you have to do is lather, rinse, and repeat. And we only did this with one. You will probably want a list of 10 to 20 to do at a time. It will save you a bunch of time.
Another thing to remember is be open to new possibilities for keywords. Don’t fall in love with your keywords. If it doesn’t fit within the criteria you set, toss it out and look for something better. There is always something better out there.
Once you have your list of 4-6 keywords that fit within your parameters, you are ready to start writing your article, post, or whatever it may be.
Happy Researching
Erich Mosier
To download this page as a PDF, click here.
Please leave me a comment and let me know if this was useful. Mail this post
Properly Configure All-In-One-SEO Plugin for Wordpress Blogs
March 23, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Plugins
How to use ALL IN ONE SEO
All in one SEO is a great Wordpress plugin to help you with the SEO of your site. It helps you to properly configure your META tags (title, description, and keywords). By leaving your SEO up to the default Wordpress settings, you are putting yourself at a big disadvantage when considering ranking.
This tutorial will show you the proper settings and configurations for using ALL in one SEO to get the most benefit out having it installed.
After installing and activating the plugin, you will need to change some of the configurations.
If you don’t have the plugin, you can get it by going here.
To get to the configuration page, in version 2.7.1, look under SETTINGS for ALL IN ONE SEO.
The first thing you want to do is to add your Title, Description, and Keywords.
Title should be no more than 65 characters maximum in size (that includes spaces).
Your description should be a maximum of 156 characters.
And your keywords should be comma separated.
Next you want to set your title format. The default setting for ALL IN ONE SEO Title format look like this:
Remove all of the "| %blog_title%" from each line. It should now look like this:
Next you want to make sure that you check "’Use noindex for Tag archives".
This will stop Google from indexing every page that a tag is associated with. So for instance, if you have a post that has 3 tags on it, and this box wasn’t checked, Google would index a page for Tag 1, Tag 2, and Tag 3. This would then appear to Google as 3 pages with duplicate content, which as a general rule, Google doesn’t like and may hurt your chances of ranking.
That is all of the changes you need to make with ALL IN ONE SEO.
Please leave me a comment and let me know if this was useful.
SEO For Blogs-SEO Tips To Improve Your Google Rankings for Blogs
March 23, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Blogging Tips & Tricks, SEO You Should Know
Wordpress Bloggers SEO Guide
Although there are a lot of different blogging platforms out there, Wordpress has become the most popular among them. The two main reasons for this is are its ability to be customized and the number of plugins available to add additional functionality. However, right out of the box, a clean installation of wordpress leaves a lot to be desired, at least from a SEO standpoint.
By making some adjustments, you can increase the effectiveness of your SEO to help improve your rankings in the search engines (a.k.a. Google).
Theme
The first decision to make is which theme to use. There are so many to choose from, sometimes it can be a little overwhelming. The theme should not only look good and convey the appropriate feel for your blog, but you want to make sure that it is structured in a way to take full advantage of SEO. For instance, you ideally want your navigation (sidebars) on the right-hand side. The reason for this is that it increases your opportunity for relevance by making your text the first thing the search engines see.
Depending on your site’s navigation, you may need to have your navigation along the top. If this is the case, just try to make sure to use good keywords as your categories or pages in your navigation. This way, again, it will help to show relevance to the search engines by being the first thing they see.
Permalinks
In the default installation of Word press, the URL of your post will be shown as a number:
http://yourblog.com/?p=321
what you actually want is your title (keywords) in the URL
http://yourblog.com/your-article-title
Both are valid and the major search engines do not have an issue indexing dynamic content anymore. However, when considering a SEO, you should remember that it is better to have your keywords in your URL to help increase your relevancy. So by making sure that you are using permalinks, you increase
your chance of getting seen.
To make this change, using version 2.7.1, under SETTINGS click on PERMALINKS.
Select CUSTOM STRUCTURE under Common Settings and type this:
%postname%
And that’s it. Your URL will now use your post title and help to increase your relevance for your main keyword.
If you would like more information on how to customize your permalinks, you can visit the wordpress codex here.
Page Title
Another one of the most important factors in your rankings is your page title. You always want to make sure you have your top keywords in your title. You have 65 characters to pack as much keyword power as you can into a readable and compelling title.
To help in managing your titles, I highly recommend the ALL-IN-ONE SEO pack plugin. It allows you to override title, meta-descriptions, and meta-keywords, as well as other important aspects of your page.
For information on the proper settings, see my article on how to configure ALL IN ONE SEO plugin correctly.
It is possible to do this manually in the code, but with every template being a little different, it makes it hard to do a good lesson on it. Besides, it is so much easier to just use the plugin. Why make life harder than it needs to be?
Headings Structure
With blogs there are two separate aspects to dealing with headings, the title of your blog and the headings in your posts and pages.
Header Headings
By default, your blog title is usually set as a H1 tag and the tagline is set as an H2. These are what show up at the very top of your blog page. You can change your blog title and tagline by going to SETTINGS GENERAL.
Depending on your blog name and domain name, this may or may not be an issue. If your domain and blog name include your main keywords for your site (what you are trying to rank for) then this is a big deal. If you blog name and domain name have nothing to do with what you are blogging about, then it really doesn’t matter.
If your domain and blog name DO include your keywords then there are a few things you will need to do. Depending on your graphic ability, or sense of style, you may want to customize your blog and make your entire header into a graphic. Which means not using any text. Here is one of my favorite examples:
The upside is that you get to have it look anyway that you want. The downside is that you are losing some SEO power. Fortunately there is an option to help balance out this dilemma.
Manually adding hidden H1 and H2 tags
By adding these lines to your header.php file you can use a purely graphic header and not handicap yourself in regards to SEO.
<h1 style=”display: none;”>Blog Title Goes Here</h1 >
<h2 style=”display: none;”>Blog Tagline goes here</h2 >