All Entries in the "Blog Link Strategy" Category

3 Things Your Blog Needs To Succeed

When it comes to business blogging, or commercial blogging, it’s not the same thing as personal blogging or blogging to make money. You are blogging to make money, but you are not trying to squeeze out revenue from your blog. You are using your blog as a marketing tool to lead people to your website so that you can close the sale and make money on your products and services. Your blog is the lead generator; your website is the salesman.

So what does your lead generation blog need in order to do its job well? Here are the three absolutely essential ingredients to make sure your company blog stands out and drives traffic to your website:

1. Quality, original content – Every day. We’re not talking about private label rights or recycled eye candy. Graphics are nice, but content is better. Eat a meal and not just a snack! Take your company talking points and turn them into a blog by getting into a real conversation with your customers about their needs and your desire to fill a niche within the marketplace. It all starts with quality, original content.
2. Links – You need to link to your website. Not just the home page either. I’m talking about real links to every page that is important on your website. And your links need to be in the body of your blog posts as well as in your sidebar blogroll. Take your important keywords and turn them into anchor text and link to each page on your website using the appropriate anchor text.
3. The right template – It can be custom-made, but it doesn’t have to be. An off-the-shelf template works just as well as long as it is SEOd properly. Your blog template needs to be crawlable so making sure that the code in your template makes it easy for the search engines to find what they need is absolutely essential. Your blog template must be able to attract a reader’s eye quickly and not drive them away, so attractiveness is important but even an ugly template with the right SEO will get you the traffic you are looking for. When it comes to getting ranked in the search engines, SEO is far more important than being pretty.

These are the three most essential elements to a successful company blog. Other things are nice, but without these three things going for you, you might as well hang it up. Everything else is gravy.

When Should You NOT Approve A Trackback Comment?

The secret is out: Trackbacks make great links. And it’s a really simple thing. Someone writes a blog post that you like and you respond on your own blog. If you use WordPress, you can copy the permalink of the blog post that you are responding to in the trackback field below the Write Post field. Your blog post will appear as a comment on the other blogger’s software Admin panel. They can approve or reject it. If they approve your trackback then your blog post will appear as a comment on their blog post, giving you a reciprocal link. If they reject your comment then you will be providing their blog with a one-way link and no reciprocal link love. Should you ever do that?

You bet. Keep in mind that one-way links are more valuable than reciprocal links, especially from relevant sites. It is considered tacky to reject trackbacks just because you want that highly coveted one-way back link. The content that appears in your comments is important too, for several reasons. But that doesn’t mean you should approve every trackback. There are times when you’d want to say “No” to that trackback. When are they?

You might reject a trackback for the following reasons:

• The comment is from a known spam site – If you know that a particular site is a known spam site, even if their trackback seems legitimate, then you might not want to approve their trackback comment.
• The trackback itself appears to be a form of spam and not really a true comment – Sometimes legitimate bloggers are guilty of spam too. It might be inadvertent or blatant. Either way, you have readers to protect.
• You are being linked to from a site whose mission and purpose you don’t agree with entirely – You have to be careful with this one. Just because you don’t agree with what they are doing doesn’t mean that everyone will disagree or that their business model is a bad one. But if it is obvious that what the blogger is doing is unethical or illegal then you shouldn’t promote it.
• The site is a non-relevant site and you don’t want to lose your blog readers to a non-relevant site – Sometimes you’ll get a link from a non-relevant site and you just don’t want to lose your visitors to that site.
• The blogger linking to you links to you too often – Some bloggers just overdo a good thing.
• The trackback is inconsistent with your comment policy – If you have a comment policy and a trackback blatantly is in violation, don’t make an exception just because it’s a trackback.
• The trackback is from a site that exists primarily for advertising – If the only content on a blog or website linking to you is advertising, other than content that you created, then don’t link back to them; this is just like spam.
• The site is a malware or warez site – Don’t send your readers anywhere you wouldn’t want to go.

These may not be the only reasons you’d want to reject a trackback comment, but these are good reasons not to keep those trackback comments alive on your site. You have readers to protect, so protect them. And protect your own reputation as well.

Keyword Density: Do Bloggers Need It?

It is my responsibility at Blog Content Provider to ensure that bloggers are trained properly on blog optimization techniques and helping our customers achieve the results they are looking for from their blogs. One of my newest bloggers asked me recently what keyword density I want to see in my blog posts. It’s a question that one will see frequently in forums, though I admit I don’t get it as much any more. But some new bloggers still wonder about keyword density. My response is always the same.

In my view, keyword density is a poor measure of SEO success. It doesn’t really get you anywhere and the reason is because all of the search engines have a multitude of factors that they take in and consider when it comes to ranking websites for keyword positioning. You can’t rely on one factor alone and keyword density relies too heavily upon the use of keywords within your blog posts. An overly aggressive tendency to focus on keywords could lead to spammy behavior and, well, that won’t help you any – particularly when the search engines now use semantic technology to determine whether content is useful or not.

No one knows for sure what the most important ranking factors are, but through trial and error, many SEOs have discovered that some things are better than others. As a general rule, the following factors are some of the ranking factors that search engines consider when deciding where you should rank for your keywords:

• Keyword usage in your blog post title
• Keyword position within your blog post title
• Subheads with h1, h2, or h3 tags in conjunction with keyword usage
• Keyword anchor text usage
• Overall keyword usage within your blog post content
• Title attributes within your links
• Photo optimization practices like alt tags and surrounding text
• Relevant inbound links
• Quality of inbound links to your blog’s index page as well as each individual blog post
• Outbound links in your sidebar
• Dofollow vs. nofollow tags and destination pages of your blog post links, sidebar links, and comment links

In all, the search engines analyze over 200, or close to 300, ranking factors. Too much emphasis on any one or handful of these could lead to a reputation as a spammer or ineffective SEO. That’s why I try to teach my bloggers to think for themselves and to understand how their content is being read by and analyzed by the search engines for ranking purposes. Blog marketing is a long-term strategy that can result in your blog achieving high rankings for you keywords over time, but it isn’t an overnight success mission. Don’t treat it that way. Consistency, persistence, and flexibility are key characteristics to develop if you want to be a successful blogger.

Learn more about blog optimization from the blog optimization experts.

Article Submissions And Your Resource Box

Do you write articles and submit them to article directories. What does your resource box look like? There are two issues that often strike me as being a waste of the resource box.

The first of these is the “who are you” aspect. I have read your article, liked it and now I want to know about you. Your resource box is the perfect place to tell me about you. With a little more knowledge about you, I may decide yo check out other articles that you havr written.

Issue number two.  The links in your resource box send me to your affiliate page or to a page where the article I have just read is located. Why? I want to read more of what you to have to offer, not see your affiliates and why send me back to the article I have just read.

Your resource box is the perfect place to tell me why I should read more of what you have written. If I have just read an article on grooming cats, tell me about your history with cats. If you have been a cat breeder for 20 years – tell me. If you have a cat site or blog – tell me. That is what the resource box is all about.

When it comes to links. Send me to a page that has something worth reading. If you have affiliates you want to promote, by all means put the banners in the side bar or within the content. The page you send me to should be a related article, after cat grooming, perhaps clipping their nails. Either that or to a page that has a summary of the articles you have written so I can pick and choose where I want to go.

The resource box is the perfect place to complete the ‘sale’ to your reader to get them to your website. You just need to provide the right information to ‘close’ that sale. On many article directories, the resource box can also act to feed link juice back to your pages so by choosing your link page carefully yo can help to increase the rankings of that page.

Your resource box is single biggest asset you have outside the article itself. Maximize to your benefit and you will be surprised with the results. Use it poorly and you might just as well not bothered to submit the article in the first place.