All Entries Tagged With: "seo"

What’s The Most Important Aspect Of Blogging?

What’s most important when it comes to writing and marketing a business blog? Is it brand? Traffic? Design? Social media? SEO? Or none of the above?

Actually, it could be all of the above, but there is a deeper answer. When it comes to business blogging, there are a lot of factors to consider. But the most important aspect of your blog is your audience. Who are you writing for? Think about it for a minute and when you’ve defined your audience, write it down. Because that’s who you should write every blog post for.

Don’t write for the search engines. Yes, make sure your posts are SEOd, but don’t focus so heavily on SEO that your forget your human audience. Instead, write with your audience’s needs in mind and market your blog, write your blog, design your blog, and promote your blog with that audience in mind. It’s the most important thing about blogging.

Why You Need A Guerrilla Blogging Plan

While not getting into the nitty gritty details of guerrilla blogging (because if you click the link you’ll get them on the other side), I would like to discuss briefly why you need a guerrilla blogging strategy.

Guerrilla blogging is a term I use to describe a method of blogging based on technical SEO tactics without ruining your content for human readers. It’s a difficult thing to master, but essential (and becoming more essential every day).

So why do you need a guerrilla blogging plan? Because you want to beat the competition in the search results. Plain and simple. The Web is a very competitive environment and you need to start thinking of everyone online as your competition. The basis of guerrilla blogging is the assumption that anyone can target any key phrase at any time and try to rank in the top positions of the SERPs for that key phrase. Whether they are successful or not is another matter. But the fact that they are targeting that phrase makes them a competitor if you are also targeting the phrase.

In order to succeed at guerrilla blogging, you’ve got to blog in such a way that your own SEO benefits are maximized while everyone else’s are minimized. And if you do it right, you’ll see your web pages rise in the search engine rankings while everyone else’s falls. Guerrilla blogging works for those who use; it doesn’t for those who don’t.

What’s A ‘Bad Blog’ Anyway?

Spend any time at all online and you are sure to run into someone recommending that you start a blog for your business. Stick around any longer and you’ll encounter someone warning you not to start one if you are going to have a “bad one”. But what’s a bad blog? It’s almost never defined.

The implication is that if the content isn’t a pleasure to read then it’s a bad blog. But what is a pleasure for one person to read is not necessarily a pleasure for someone else. Have an interest in reading about badminton tips every day? No? Well, maybe someone else does.

But it isn’t all about the nature of the content either. You also have to consider blog design and the quality of the writing. Sure, you want your blog to be attractive. And, yes, you want the writing to be high quality writing. But understand that not every blog has to be of the same caliber as a blog on the A-list. If they all were then there’d be no A-list.

So what’s a bad blog? Let’s start by defining a good blog. A good blog is one that:

• Informs your readers about topics of interest within your niche
• Sets itself apart as unique from other blogs in the same niche
• Drives traffic to important landing pages on your website (the job of closing the sale is on those landing pages
• If your blog is a sales blog then it closes a decent percentage of sales or converts and adequate percentage of traffic to sales, or leads, or whatever your goal is
• Adds optimized content to your website often
• If an offsite blog, builds back links to your primary web property
• Gets people interested in your niche talking in the comments section
• Provides you with information about the needs of your target market

Not every good blog does every one of these, but a good blog should do many of them. It seems to reason then that a “bad blog” is one that doesn’t do any of these or that only does a few while neglecting the most important elements of a good blog. The problem is, a blog may have many different purposes or your standards for a good blog may not match what someone else’s idea of a good blog is. What every blog owner should refrain from doing is allowing your readers from defining what is “good” and what is “bad” based on whether or not they enjoy reading it. That’s not necessarily the judge of a good blog.

Assuming that readers must enjoy reading the blog presumes that the purpose of the blog is for readership, i.e. enjoyability. But simply having readers enjoying your content won’t necessarily lead to sales. You want your blog to make you money, right?

Of course, not all blogs are sales tools either. You can have a blog simply for SEO purposes. The point is this: Define the purpose of your blog and live up to that purpose. That’s really the only measure of blog quality. Don’t do that and you’ve got a bad blog.

The Primary Reason Your Business Needs A Blog

You’ve likely heard all the reasons your business needs a blog:

• Branding
• SEO
• Customer Service
• Being Sociable With Your Audience
• Creating Dialogue
• “Connecting” With People
• Facilitating Social Media Marketing
• Insert Reason Here

But the primary reason you need a blog is hardly ever mentioned. The best reason to start a blog today is because your competition has one.

Now I’m not suggesting that you start keeping up with the Jones’. Nor am I saying that you should be a be a follower. But the reason you should have a blog if your competition does is so that you remain competitive.

You see, a blog is one of the most dynamic SEO tools available. Any business with a blog has a distinct advantage over the competition in a number of ways. Here’s how a blog benefits any business that has one:

• Increases search engine saturation – the number of pages you have ranked in the search engines
• Boosts your link popularity – the number of inbound links to your website
• Gives you more content on your website, making your site more crawlable and more often crawled by the search engines

I could go on and on about the benefits of blogging, but what it all boils down to is a blog on your competition’s website gives them an edge in the search engines. If you don’t have one then you are at a disadvantage. If you have a blog and your competition doesn’t then you have the advantage. If you and your competition both have blogs then there is a more level playing field, except that the one who can better manage their blog could have a better advantage.

In business, it’s all about competition. A blog can give you an edge where before you didn’t have one. And that’s why you need a blog today.

A Blog Is The Best Link Building Tool You Have

I love it when people verify what I’ve been saying for years. Michael Martinez back in February had a great post that discussed the three best link building tools. One of those is blogging.

Here’s what he says about the benefits of blogging:

Pros of Blogs
–They are usually easy to set up and low-maintenance
–They are more powerful and flexible than widgets, gadgets, gizmos, and plug-ins
–They allow you to populate multiple domains/subdomains quickly

And I’ll add this to the pro list on blogs as well – They achieve better search engine results more quickly than any other tool available. Yes, even better than articles. Better than static websites. Better than social media. More powerful than a speeding bullet. Etc.

Why are blogs so good for search engine optimization, including link building? Because they are crawled – like all updated content – every single time you update them. The more often you update your blog, the more it will get crawled. The more it gets crawled, the more opportunities you have of achieving great rankings. Each and every blog post you write is treated like a separate web page by the search engines. Therefore, every ranking factor that applies to any web page applies to every single blog post you write. If you have a blog with 500 blog posts then that’s 500 chances to rank for your keyword, 500 chances + for your links to build link juice and gain the age advantage, 500 chances to build anchor text links with high quality and relevance, etc. Blogging is guerrilla SEO on steroids!

I could write all day about the search engine benefits of blogging. But, do it wrong, and you can kill your rankings. That’s why it is important to choose an expert in blogging, ghostwriting, and SEO who can steer you in the right direction and keep you away from dangerous waters.

Want to know more? Get a free consult with a blog consultant.

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.

Should You SEO Your Blog?

Lately I’ve been speaking to quite a few more people than I’d expect to who write blogs, but don’t SEO them. I’ve even heard a few debates about whether or not you should SEO a blog. The pros and cons and yada yada yada. Quite frankly, I find the discussion just silly. Why wouldn’t you SEO your blog?

The thinking behind not SEOing your blog boils down to one thing really: The blog owner doesn’t want to appear like they are spamming. They want their content to be “readable”. Well, who doesn’t?

By “readable”, those who argue against SEO for a blog do so on the basis that natural language writing is best for humans because it is more interesting, thought provoking, and inviting. I agree. You should always write your blog in a natural way. Natural language writing is better for humans and, here’s a little secret, the search engines like it too.

The whole argument about SEO on your blog is really missing the point. Those who argue against SEO don’t really understand SEO. It isn’t about tossing in keywords where they don’t belong. In fact, if you toss in keywords just for the sake of it, you are likely to do yourself more damage in the search engines than good. That’s not what SEO is all about.

Effective SEO is natural language writing. But it’s natural language writing that is cognizant of the SEO benefits. If you are aware that the words you use will be ranked in a certain way then you’ll use those words in such a way that they benefit you while you write in a natural language way.

So the next time someone invites you into a discussion about SEO vs. natural language, just grin and say, “I’d like both please.”

Is Your Permalink Structure Helping Or Hurting You?

I read a lot of blogs. One of the things that I look at when I evaluate a blog I’ve never read before is the permalink structure. I ask myself, “Why did the blogger do it this way?”

Sometimes I can ascertain a good reason. Other times I am totally clueless. If I’m not sure why the blogger chose the permalink structure they chose it’s usually either because they are so advanced that I am not aware of a particular tactic they are using or the blogger doesn’t have a good understanding of SEO and isn’t using best practices. Permalink structure does matter and if you are starting a new company blog you should seriously consider what your links and URLs will look like.

First, the definition – a permalink is the URL of a particular blog post. It includes the root domain, the folder on which your blog sits, the blog post title, and anything else you add in there to identify it. Usually, bloggers will incorporate category names, dates, and/or numerical sequencing protocol. By and large, these can be helpful or a hindrance depending on how they are incorporated.

I’d stay away from category names. They can pigeonhole your blog posts in ways that will hurt you. For instance, your blog post could end up ranking for your category name and not for anything related to your blog post itself. That would be a bad thing.

Dates can also have a detrimental effect. Human readers may look at dates in your permalink structure and disregard anything that is beyond 6 months or a year. That will hurt your credibility.

A number sequencing system can distinguish your blog posts from each other, which is good, but if you stick with that alone then you get no SEO benefits. Using these principles, I’d say your best bet for a permalink structure on your blog is like this:

root/blog folder name/blog post title/number sequence

If your blog is a standalone blog, exists on its own domain name apart from a website, then the root and blog folder name should be the same. That will make your permalinks shorter, which is good. You can also add plugins that will shorten your permalinks. One good one is SEO Slugs, which strips away small words like ‘a’, ‘the’, and ‘and’, leaving only your important words and keywords.

You want your permalinks to be as short as possible with all of the relevant information included that will give you the best and most optimal search engine ranking advantages. Otherwise, you could be shooting yourself in the foot.

WordPress Tip: What To Do When Permalinks Don’t Work

Here’s a good article on WordPress permalinks. Can’t really argue with it.

When WordPress Permalinks Don’t Work

By Royce Tivel

You have just completed the installation and configuration of your new WordPress blog–by the book. You proudly log into the dashboard and select a customized permalink (I use /%postname%/) and then hit the “Save Changes” button to save your configuration. Your blog now–goes crazy. When you try to access your blog, your browser returns nasty error pages instead of your blog’s content.

You recheck everything again, but can’t find any problem with your installation procedure. Using your FTP program or the WebShell utility at your web-host’s control panel, you verify that all of the necessary WordPress files and folders are in place and that the permissions are set correctly. In desperation, and using the control panel’s phpMyAdmin interface, you also verify that the MySQL database has been installed correctly and that the installer has configured the database tables. What could be wrong?

Before deleting your WordPress files and folders and zeroing out the database prior to trying a new installation, you grab a cup of your favorite beverage and relax a minute. You think about your installation. You remember that your new blog worked perfectly before you elected to change the permalink structure. Maybe it’s time to look at the server’s error log for the blog’s domain to see if it points to the root problem.

In the server’s error log, accessed from the web-host’s control panel, you notice the following error entry:

[Sun Mar 29 13:30:38 2009] [error] [client ...] Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden ….

Bingo! Now you remember seeing something when you used your control panel to set up your blog’s domain. You log into your control panel and select the “Web options” icon. Right at the top of the options page you see that the “Symbolic Links” option is disabled. You enable and apply this option–and now the health of your blog is restored.

Well, almost restored. One nagging error continues to be recorded in the error log:

[Sun Mar 29 22:07:14 2009] [error] [client ...] File does not exist: …/favicon.ico

When a browser accesses a web site, it always looks for a favicon.ico. WordPress does not install a favicon.ico by default. You need to either create your own or upload something suitable. Once the favicon.ico is uploaded into the blog’s root directory, this log error will disappear, too.

P.S. The Error log is your friend. Be sure to look at it from time to time.

For more articles, tips, and tutorials of interest to WordPress users, please visit these web sites:
http://www.blog.selectdigitals.com
http://www.selectdigitals.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Royce_Tivel

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Blog Theme Customization: Is It Worth It?

Should you customize your blog theme? It’s a question that every company will have to consider when starting a new blog. Or why not just go with an off-the-shelf blog theme?

There are pros and cons to using a theme right off the shelf without any customization. One pro is an off-the-shelf blog theme will not cost you anything. It’s free. If you want to customize your blog theme then you’ll run into additional expenses. You will, after all, have to pay the designer who does the work for you.

The most important aspect of this decision is in choosing a theme that is well optimized. You do not want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a blog theme customization only to find out that the theme isn’t well optimized and won’t get crawled by the search engine spiders. That’s why the designer you choose to perform the customization is as important as the blog theme itself. Your designer should have an understanding of search engine optimization and know what the search engines are looking for before he ever touches your blog theme.

When it comes to blog optimization, many off-the-shelf templates do the trick. But you still need to have an optimization expert look at your theme to see if it is well optimized for search. It’s the most important aspect of your blog theme’s design. The actual design is a close second.