All Entries Tagged With: "search rankings"
Blog Content Drives Traffic – Plain And Simple
There are two posts that stand out today and both reinforce our message that content, regular content, is one of the surest ways of gaining a decent rank in organic search results. Blogs and blog content is one of the easiest ways of publishing that content. Hiring a blog writer makes the task even easier. So what are those two posts?
The first one almost screamed the message – The Most Amazing Sentence On The Internet. And it was. What was the sentence?
No other marketing piece can do what adding fresh content to your web site can.
Do you view content as a marketing tool? It is, in fact, almost everything you do to a website or blog has some sort of marketing effect. Adding fresh content, particularly content that users find helpful is very definitely marketing. I repeat my earlier statement – blog content is one of the fastest and easiest ways to add that content. You don’t need any special programming skills; if you can open a word-processor then you can open a blog and create content. If you don’t have the skills or talent to create content, think again. Almost everyone can. Of course, if quality is your benchmark, then by all means hire a professional content creator.
That leads me to the second post that stood out today – Do you need a website content writer? This type of post is starting to appear quite frequently across the net as more and more people realize they have writing skills and can sell their services. As a website or blog owner, the key is to weed out those who are not as skilled as they profess and to find writers who are skilled. This is where a professional blog content service comes into play. They have proven track records and experience in not only providing the content, they can also provide a range of blog services such as comment moderation and blog maintenance.
If you’re running a business, can you afford to not use the services of a professional blog management team.
Blog Ghostwriting Lets You Get On With Business
Search engine optimization is a slow process, a process that can take months to see results. You can speed that process up by adding a blog to your website. You can speed the process up even further by creating a self hosted blog on a separate server to your website. The one argument we frequently hear is that time is a big issue. It needn’t be. Get someone else to do the ghostwriting and you can get on with building your business.
If you are going to build your business’s online profile then you need to invest in your future. The small cost you pay today to create a blog and have a ghostwriter create the content will pay huge dividends in the future when your main business website starts to rank highly in search results. More importantly, a blog can help you add hundreds of long tail keywords, long tails that individually only provide a small amount of traffic, but collectively account for a large amount – and it is often more targeted.
What makes a website popular? Why does one online entrepreneur make more money than another? What Makes Home-Based Medical Transcription Lucrative? They all have one thing in common. They promote what they do well. For a business, a blog is the start. Add a social bookmarking and social media marketing regime to your regular posting and your blog will rapidly climb the search rankings. I read where one blog wondered “Is Social Search Just Getting Its Diapers?” It probably is – however the future is bright for social search and if you can take advantage of it now, you will be well placed when social search does advance.
If you are wondering where to start when it comes to creating a blog, I suggest you read Why Develop Your Own Blog Platform? first. There are plenty of good blog platforms around so don’t try and reinvent the wheel – go with what works. A post that reinforces everything we have said in the past describes How writing for the web differs from writing for print. There is a big difference between the two.
Blogs are an important tool for any business if they want to build their profile and increase visitor numbers. If you need a ghostwriter to get your blog off the ground and sending traffic to your website, contact a professional blog manager. They can develop your blog while you develop your business.
Why Your Site’s Bounce Rate Is Important For Rankings
Blogs are at a disadvantage in one regard: Traditionally, they have high bounce rates. That’s because readers generally read one post and they’re gone. This is especially true of subscribers.
But that may not matter in the long run even though bounce rates are important for ranking purposes. This isn’t proven, but I believe it’s true. Google has stated publicly that they measure traffic and rank websites based on traffic. But a high traffic site may not necessarily be of any value any more than a low traffic site with a low bounce rate. All things considered, a high traffic site with a high bounce rate may actually be holding a negative, not a positive.
Consider this: A site receives 100,000 daily visitors on a regular basis. 80% of those visitors are unique and 80% of those read one page and they’re gone, never to return. Would you want that? Or would you prefer to have 1,000 daily visitors of which 80% are loyal and return on a regular basis? I think we’d all rather have the latter, right?
Particularly if your site is a blog. You want readers coming back.
A loyal readership is much more valuable than high numbers of people that show up and leave. But I do believe that your site’s bounce rate may be an indicator of user value in the eyes of at least one search engine. Work on creating valuable content and your bounce rate will go down. You might even see a resulting increase in search ranking for some of your keywords.
Use Your Blog To Build Inbound Links
A blog is a great way to build inbound links. You can use an offsite blog to build links to your static website by posting daily and using your keywords as anchor text to build those inbound links. The best way to use a blog for building links is to augment other types of Internet marketing that you do and not try to do too much too soon. You don’t want the search engines thinking you are spamming and discounting those links. In the case of linking from your blog to your static site, moderation is the key.
There are two ways to make your blog’s inbound links for you:
- Sidebar
- In-text
Your sidebar links are permanent links and won’t help you a great deal, but they do help brand your blog and drive traffic to important pages where you want your traffic to go. Your in-text in-blog-post links are the best links you can have. The search engines love those links. And they count to help push your static site up in the rankings. Learn more about how an offsite blog can help you build inbound links.
Ranking Highly Is Not An Exact Science
Many good bloggers focus too heavily on keywords. While keywords are important, you can emphasize them too much. What is more important is quality content. Here are some rebuttals to the arguments made in this article.
Getting Your Blog to Rank Highly In Search Engines
There is little point in writing a blog if no one comes to read it. Blogs are automatically search engine friendly because of their fresh content and clean formatting, but there are a few easy techniques you can use to improve your rankings.
A few words about keywords:
1. Choose your Keywords wisely.
You can choose to write on a topic, or for a key word or phrase, that is immensely popular and has a ton of competition, and never stand a chance of getting in the top page or two of rankings. Or you can choose similar but more targeted keyword or phrase with less competition be in the top 10 listings.
Actually, you should choose popular keywords or phrases. Don’t waste a lot of time looking for all the “long tail” keywords so you can rank for them. Keep a list of important keywords for your business and run through all of them – long tail and broad search. You don’t have to rank on page 1 of Google for every single keyword or phrase. Some of your best traffic will come from your pings.
2. Key Word or Phrase? That is the next question.
Most people do not use a single word for a search engine query. The often search a phrase or even type an entire question. This is not necessarily the most efficient way to search, but it is the most natural. So do not think you need to limit yourself to single key word. A key phrase of three – five words is entirely appropriate.
It is difficult to optimize a blog post for keyword phrases longer than three words. When you optimize a blog post, your three keywords or phrase do not even have to be contiguous – one right after another. You can split up the phrase several times in your blog post and still rank for the phrase because most search engines these days are using semantic language algorithms. Your phrase does not have to remain in tact for every usage.
3. Choose your URL wisely.
Once you have chosen your keyword, it is time to choose your URL wisely. Whether your blog is hosted by your blogging software, on your own domain or subdomain. You want your primary keyword to be in your domain name (URL).
If you use WordPress, which I highly recommend, all you have to do is include your specific keyword or phrase in the title of your post and WordPress will automatically include that in your URL. It’s called a permalink. Of course, you have to change the default settings in WordPress to format your permalink properly. That isn’t hard to do if you know how. A one-hour tutorial can help you get your permalink set right, or a professional WordPress expert can do it for you.
4. Keyword Placement
Besides having your primary key word in your URL, you also want it to appear the header tags and titles of your posts.
Yes, I recommend adding a title and description tag at the very least to your header.php file. Again, a one-hour tutorial can help you do that, or a WordPress expert can do it for you.
5. Keyword usage in the body of your post
When writing each post you of course want to use your primary keyword(s) in the text, but don’t over do it or you’ll sound like spam. Always write in a natural, reader friendly manner. This is also the place put a few secondary keywords as well.
This is where a lot of bloggers go wrong. Don’t overdo it. Blog spam is easily detected by the search engines and if you litter your blog posts with your keyword over and over again then it won’t rank the way you want it to. The search engines will discount it as spam. Use your keyword phrase, but use it sparingly.
6. Keywords in Links
Keywords that appear in links are more important than those in plain text. So where appropriate, when linking to another blog or website, use your keywords in the text of links.
Do it once or twice. I’ve seen bloggers use six or eight links in a 300-word blog post. That’s spam. It doesn’t help you. Search engines will only count the first instance of your anchor text. After that, strategically place your links for driving traffic where you want it to go. Otherwise, you’ll be guilty of overkill, aka “spam”.
7. Keyword Categories
Another natural place to put your keywords in your Category names.
Yep. I agree. And be sure to include tags with each post. The latest edition of WordPress has a field for you to enter your tags.
Keywords are not the only thing search engines consider when ranking your blog. Here are few other areas to consider:
Links
Links that point to your blog and posts are very important to building pagerank.
1. Search Engines and Directories
Being listed in search engines and directories provide great single direction links. So make sure you submit your blog, first of all to dmoz.org. This is end all, be all to internet directories and is a place that most search engines pull from to find websites to spider. After than submit directly to the major search engines, that way they know you exist. Finally, submit to the blog search engines and various free directories.
This information is so outdated. First, DMOZ is not the end-all be-all of directories. It could take as long as a year to get listed there AFTER you submit your blog. By that time you could 365 blog posts, or more, and already have top 10 listings with single blog posts. Sure, submit to DMOZ, but even if you don’t, do other things right and you’ll have a blog that you can be proud of.
You don’t have to submit your blog to search engines any more. That’s why they have spiders. The most important thing to do to get your blog crawled by the search engines within 72 hours is to get at least one inbound link. Find a local directory and submit your blog to it. Open an account at Google Webmaster Central and verify your blog. Also, verify it with Yahoo! and MSN. Once you do that, you’ll be crawled.
Here is a well respected list of Blog Directories by Robin Good.
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top552. Articles
Turn some of your blog posts into articles and submit them to the article directories. This will get you more linkbacks.
Yes, this is a good long-term strategy.
3. Comment
Leave appropriate comments on forums and other blogs with a link to your site in the comment.
This is a great way to get quick back links to your blog. Find two or three forums and blogs in your niche and leave a comment. Don’t spam them. Find an appropriate topic and join the conversation. Make it seem natural and people will love you.
Updates
1. Update your blog.
The more fresh content you have, the happier the spiders are. Some blogging software will even let you write posts in advance and schedule them to be posted on certain days.
You can timestamp your blog posts, but I don’t recommend it. We found out that WordPress pings your blog posts when you publish them, not when they go live. That means that if you timestamp a blog at 5 p.m. to go live the next morning at 10 a.m. then it will notify all the ping directories at 5 p.m. on the day that you publish, a full 17 hours before you want the post to go live. You’ll likely get visitors to that blog posts too soon and if it contains information that you don’t want to go public before 10 a.m. the next day, you’ve breached your own security.
Blog directories like Technorati index blog posts by listing the latest one at the top and the oldest ones below it. If you want your post to go live at 10 a.m. the next day then when 10 a.m. comes around, because you pinged when you published, that blog post will be at the bottom of the heap. The people you want to read it when you want them to read it will not get that chance. I don’t recommend timestamping. A better solution is to write the post ahead of time and save it as a draft. Then when it comes time to publish it, you can login and publish it in a few seconds.
2. Ping
After you update your blog, you’ll want to “ping” the search engines to let them know you have new content. That will get your site spidered more often. You can us the Ping-O-Matic Tool (http://pingomatic.com/) to ping a lot of search engines all at once. Alternately, if you use Feedburner, for your RSS distribution, they have a tool that will automatically ping the search engines when you update your blog.
Yes, Feedburner does have a ping tool. So does WordPress. I recommend getting a list of ping directories and insert that list into the ping field of WordPress. Alternatively, you can use Feedburner’s distribution model. One or the other is fine.
Other words on Feedburner, even if you use WordPress to ping the directories, I still recommend Feedburner for RSS distribution.
Follow these few easy guidelines and see your blog listed in the search engines in no time.
Cheryl Hartzman is a successful work at home mom who specializes in providing advice and opportunities to others who want to earn a living working at home. For more information about working at home, visit her blog at http://wahcenter.blogspot.com.
Copyright © 2008 Cheryl Hartzman. All Rights Reserved (Article may be reprinted if all text and links remain intact and unchanged.)
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Cheryl Harzman has some good advice for you here, but some of it is outdated and incomplete, or inaccurate.
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