All Entries Tagged With: "Blog Optimization"

Keyword Management: How Should A Blog Be Written?

I manage a handful of bloggers and have managed more than 100 blogs in the last couple of years. I also read a great deal about blogging and copywriting from other bloggers in the industry. I’ve noticed that there are two general views regarding how to write a blog. Those views can be summarized below:

• Valuable Content View – This is the view that your content should be written with your readers in mind, not the search engines. The idea is that keywords are necessary, but not so important that you forget about the needs of your readers. You aren’t writing keyword fluff. You’re writing content that will be deemed valuable by human readers and not just words on a page driven by keyword usage
• Keyword-Rich View – The keyword-rich view is just the opposite. This view presupposes that SEO is everything. Without the right mix of keywords and the correct density patterns and so on you might as well not even blog. If you don’t optimize every single blog post to the utmost then you aren’t really blogging, according to this view. The weakness of this view is that optimization may get you good rankings, though often you can end up hurting yourself by over optimizing, it won’t endure you to your readers and what good is a blog if it has no readers?

Here at Blog Content Provider, we believe in SEO content. We are an SEO company. But we also believe in reaching readers at a gut level. That’s why I like to stress valuable content first and SEO as an additional benefit. Because if you do it right, your blog will attract readers and when it does it will increase in SEO power by sheer authoritativeness.

Why You Want Your Categories To Be Keyword Driven

You know you should have categories in your blog’s sidebar. But did you know those categories should be a list of your important keywords? There are multiple reasons why, but the long and the short of it is that they help you optimize your blog. Every instance of keyword usage on your blog is one step closer to high rankings. Plus, those category names are not just keywords, they are also links, which makes them even more valuable.

Here’s a case study of how a category name can assist you with search engine benefits. Type “blog content ghostwriting” into Google’s search box (without the quotation marks). Now click on the link at the top of the page, just above the search results, that says “Show options”. Select Recent Results and sort by date. Now scroll down to position No. 8 in the results. Here’s what you should see.

At the time of my writing this blog post, this post on quality content was in the position No. 8 position 58 minutes after posting.

Examining the contents of that blog post, there is nothing in that post that discusses blogging or ghostwriting. Those words are not even mentioned in the post anywhere. So how did the post rank on Page 1 of the SERPs for the parameters we gave it? By the blog’s categories.

Take a look at those categories and you’ll see that there is one called “Blog Marketing”, another one called “Content/Website Development” and one titled “Copywriting & Ghostwriting”. All three of the search phrases used are category names on this blog, giving the latest blog post – serendepitously all about content – an added boost.

This is just one example out of millions. Keyword-focused categories are an optimization essential and can often help individual blog posts rank for key terms they might not otherwise rank for.

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.

Blog Optimization: Template Or Original Design?

Should you use a blog template or have an original design for your blog? That’s an important question. There are pros and cons to both approaches.

If you use a blog template you run the risk of your template not being optimized properly. You might also find yourself using a template that thousands of other bloggers are using as well. That lack of originality might work against you in some industries. But pulling a template off the shelf can be easier and much less costly than having an original design done.

To be sure, there is no substitute for originality. Original designs tell your readers that you take pride in your business. But if you go with an original blog design be prepared to pay for it. Templates are free. Original designs, unless you do them yourself, are not. And another thing you have to be sure of with an original design is that your designer is familiar enough with SEO to optimize your design properly. If you hire a designer whose knowledge of SEO is not adequate you have no recourse. You are stuck with a non-optimized blog. With a template you can change it out for another one at no cost.

If you have the money to pay for an original blog design then by all means, go ahead and put forth the expense. But in today’s economy that’s a challenge for many businesses. That’s why you might be better off with a blog template. But who’s going to select one for you? Make sure your blog consultant knows how to tell the difference.