All Entries in the "Blog Optimization" Category

How Many Blog Categories Should You Have?

I like the rule that says “Keep it simple”. You don’t need a hundred categories unless you have a blog that is built for a specific purpose and that’s your shtick. But by and large, fewer categories is best. I don’t mean be an extreme minimalist. Two categories probably isn’t enough. I would say you should have around 10-15 categories for your blog and no more.

Why 10-15?

Good question. You want at least 10 categories to show that you have a variety of topics you blog about. You want to keep your limit to 15, however, so you can focus your blog on specific keywords within your niche. It’s better for optimization purposes.

As you blog, you’ll find yourself blogging on specific topics more often. Try to even it out some if you can. Keep your categories as broad as you can without making them too broad and anything you blog about that fits into the broad spectrum of your categories should go into just one category. Use the tags to add additional flavor to your blog posts and to add keyword-specific organization to each blog post that is a bit more narrow than the categories allow. This gives your blog readers two ways to find information they are looking for. But don’t make your tags and categories the same; that will kill your organizational structure.

What Is Keyword Stuffing?

Management of keywords is one of the most important tasks you have to accomplish as a blogger. How do you do it? Should you stuff your content with keywords in the hopes that more is better?

The search engines – and Google in particular – have tried to discourage keyword stuffing for several years. Keyword stuffing is the act of tossing keywords into your content in hopes that it will improve your rankings. But that’s not a good habit to get into.

First, keyword stuffing doesn’t work. Putting a couple of extra keywords into your content just to be sure isn’t going to help you rank better. In fact, it could work against you if you have too many keywords. What is more important than keyword density, as some people call it, is keyword placement.

Keyword placement involves discovering where in your content it is more effective to place your keywords. I’d rather have one well placed keyword than a half a dozen keywords stuffed in just for the sake of it. The search engines use a weighted approach to valuing content based on your usage of important keywords. Unlock the key to that weighted approach and you’ll unlock the key to good company blogging. Trust me, it’s all in the keywords.

Do You Keyword Target Your Blog THIS WAY?

Keyword targeting is one of the best ways to market through a blog, but most companies aren’t using every available asset to their advantage. The best way to drive targeted traffic to the most important pages on your website is to write well-optimized on-page content with one single keyword in mind for every page on your website then write optimized blog posts around the same keyword and use that keyword as anchor text for links from your blog to your website. Simple, but so few business bloggers are doing it.

Whether your blog is an onsite blog or an offsite blog, this is the best way to target traffic to your pages. Look at it this way:

• A searcher types in a search phrase (will they find you?)
• That search phrase brings up your blog post about that topic
• In your blog post you use the same search phrase as a link, which points to a specific page on your website that is optimized for the same phrase
• The searcher reads your blog post, likes what you have to say, and decides to visit your website to get more information; so she clicks the link
• Your well-optimized web page fills the searcher’s need for information so she signs up for your newsletter; now you have her in your sales funnel. Don’t lose her!

You have to understand the natural link following patterns of your users. If you understand online human behavior then you can write your content to get the response you desire, but it starts with keyword targeting.

WordPress Blog Optimization

We talk a lot about blog post optimization, but what you very seldom see, here or elsewhere, are tips on how to optimize your actual blog software. WordPress is an open source blogging platform, the most popular on the market. You should begin your blog optimization efforts by ensuring that the settings in WordPress are set to maximize your search engine optimization. Here are a few tips to help you do that:

• Start with your theme. Your first step in blog optimization in choosing a suitable theme. WordPress has thousands of free themes available for download, but not all of them are good themes. You are better off sticking with themes that are proven. Don’t use a theme that is from a first-time developer. They tend to have the most problems. Also, make sure your theme has developer contact information just in case you need it. And don’t choose a theme that has a lot of extemporaneous code. Otherwise, most of your themes should be good. But if you choose a theme and after about three or four weeks you don’t see any blog posts getting indexed at the search engines and you know you have good inbound links then test another theme to see if you get better results.
• Move to settings. After picking a theme, click on Settings on the back up administration area of WordPress. Make sure Blog Title and Tagline have eye-catching attention-getting content and that you use your primary keyword in both fields.
• Add a ping list. Under Settings again, click on Writing. Scroll down to the bottom and in the Update Services box add as many ping services as you can. Don’t just pick the top ones, but do include Pingomatic, Technorati, Coreblog, Blogstreet, Google Blogsearch, and Blogflux at a minimum. There are other ping services, particularly some foreign ping services, that I’d recommend as well. The reason you want to include foreign language ping services is because some of them will get you indexed through the back door of the search engines more quickly than places like Pingomatic and Technorati. One mistake that many new bloggers make is to stick to Technorati or Pingomatic and that’s it, but by limiting yourself to the larger ping lists you are cutting yourself short.
• Use Summary for feeds. Under the Reading tab below Settings, select Summary for your feeds rather than full post. This will force your RSS subscribers to visit your blog in order to read your entire post. Most subscribers will not have a problem doing this if they want to read your blog and getting your readers to your blog will register more traffic with your analytics software, which is measured by the search engines for quality and user experience, factors that may influence your future rankings. This is particularly true if your blog has a low bounce rate.
• Permalinks. Click Permalinks under Settings. This is very important. The structure of your blog post URLs, called permalinks, is very important for SEO purposes. You want your primary keyword to appear in your permalink. To make sure that happens, ensure that you write each blog post title to include your keyword, but also set your WordPress setting to Custom, Day and name, or Month and name. I prefer Custom because it allows me to move the date to the very end of the Permalink and put my keyword closer to the beginning.

There are other ways that you can optimize WordPress for better search engine results. Some plugins can be of great assistance here. But you can also tweak some of the code in your templates to ensure better results. That is more advanced than what this blog post needs. For now, as a bare minimum, use these strategies to optimize your WordPress blog before you start writing.