All Entries Tagged With: "seo"

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.