Blogging seems to be the ideal solution for many things, one of which being SEO. Many people know this, and even more learn this, but I wonder if people often understand why having a blog is important for SEO. Basic and very practical SEO Tips tell us that we should avoid bad coding, use relevant keywords, be conscious of where we place them in text, and get inbound links. Considering these tips, then a blog is an ideal solution for SEO.
Let’s consider coding. Both WordPress and Blogger maintain excellent coding standards. Each platform comes with a standard (approved) template that meets the W3C standards. Actually, Blogger comes with around 25 and WordPress only has one. In both platforms, however, there are hundreds of open sourced templates available that also meet the coding standards. These templates can be downloaded and installed at no charge.
What about using relevant keywords? With a blog, you have all the tools needed to write about the topics you want and stay on topic. Each blogging platform gives you the ability to categorize, label, and or tag your articles by sub-topic. Writing content based on relevant keywords comes very easy doing so on a blog. Housing your content within a blog also gives you the ability to stay organized yourself and drill down into micro niche keywords and more longtail keyword topics.
Considering the ease of writing content around relevant keywords, obviously the placement of keywords comes easy too. With most blog platforms, especially Blogger and WordPress, users are given a rich text editor to use. This means that you can properly write content, placing your keywords in your intro paragraphs, and control the amount of reinforcing keywords within the body content and closing paragraph. Also, and most importantly, the rich text editor allows you to easily using heading, bold, and italic tags. Your rich text is formatted into W3C compliant HTML code in the background.
Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.
Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.
This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well. Now, with the blog itself, because you’re writing (or should be) excellent content that appeals to people, their natural behavior will be to link to the articles on your blog. Some readers may share your articles with friends by submitting them into social networking site such as Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and StumbleUpon. When that happens, your articles will be viewed by more people. Search engines, especially Google, keep track of this.
To summarize. A blog is a great thing to have if you’re focused on SEO. A blog can be used to help a main website rank better in search engines simply due to increasing inbound links. Secondly, a blog is a natural inbound link magnet itself. Thirdly, a blog provides users with excellent publishing tools to write and format content in a search engine friendly way. All in all, if you have a website, it would be an excellent idea to also have a blog, covering a relevant topic to your main site. Doing so could be the difference of your site landing on page one, or page doesn’t matter.
SEO ARTICLE POST for article writers and readers
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Why do I need to blog for my site?
Amazingly enough, I can’t tell you how many glazed over looks I still receive when I tell people that social media is not about how many networks you can list, nor is it about throwing up a profile on a social network like you did with your website 12 years ago. It’s not necessarily about building your own social network either.
Whether anyone likes it or not, social media engagement is really about blogs.
I’m not saying you or your company must have a blog, but building relationships with relevant bloggers and understanding how blogs work is essential to any social media strategy.
What social media engagement really requires is a fundamental shift in how companies approach mass communication. Without this shift — even if it comes about gradually, any attempts at throwing up outposts on Facebook or anyplace else on the web will basically be a waste of time.
The key is not to create a social media check-list with names of social networks or tools that dictates you have a Facebook page and a MySpace page.
Most of the time, companies are filling these spaces with all the same old content they already have on their website. Depending on your objectives, that may be okay, but it’s always better to research and identify ways those spaces, and others, can be used to engage the people who are already there and empower them with the ability to share your message — maybe even reward them for doing so.
To reap benefits of engagement, even those spaces should promote a level of call and response as well as some kind of takeaway for consumers to share within their own corner of the social web. This keeps people interested in what you have to offer.
The monologue is now a dialogue
I know a lot of us keep saying this, but believe me, it bears repeating.
Sure, a good understanding of how these technologies work will come in handy, but companies are better served by understanding how information travels along the social web. Whether anyone likes it or not, information no longer travels in a straight shot from company to journalist to public.
Instead, it bounces back and forth between all three. It’s just as possible for information to swell up from the public to the journalist to the company, or from the public to the company to the journalist. Or from the journalist to the company to the public and back again.
You don’t have time to write a press release and get key messages ready for every little statement companies will be demanded upon to make. Ignoring this will simply make your company look like it’s either out of touch or worse — that it doesn’t care.
People within organizations need to be empowered to have conversations with others on the social web. Does this have the potential to get messy? You bet. Does it end there? Not at all.
The nature of a dialogue is that there are ample chances to clarify and correct your position as you go along. Admitting errors quickly and moving on is a quality we tend to admire in other human beings — we respect this quality in companies, too.
As a side note, I’ve used this example before, but if you need a good visual for how information travels along the social web, check out David Armano‘s Influence Ripples. I like it so much, I even carry around one of his business cards with the image on the back just so I can it to show people at parties.
What may be shocking to some (especially those in the technology sector) is that in many industries, companies still don’t think blogs are important.
Q Who reads blogs?
A Journalists
If for no other reason, companies should pay attention to blogs simply because journalists do.
More than three quarters of journalists see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles, and insight into the tone of an issue, according to a study conducted last year by Brodeur, a unit of of Omnicom Group in conjunction with Marketwire. I found out about this study from a post Valeria Maltoni wrote on her blog.
This fact proves that information journalists receive from blogs helps them know what questions to ask, what are the hot-button issues, anecdotal evidence of consumer attitude, etc.
If you don’t think this is important, you’re not seeing the big picture.
Another item to consider is that blogs, by their very nature of regular updates, incoming and outgoing links, are very search engine friendly.
Q Who uses search? (i.e. Google, Yahoo!)
A Just about everybody… but also journalists
The most commonly referenced figure is 92 percent. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project March 2007 report, 92 percent of journalists use search engines to research story ideas. This means that they are not searching their inboxes looking for your press release. They know how to find information on their own.
What does search have to do with blogs?
Blogs automatically archive old material, they’re regularly updated, chock full of content as well as incoming and outgoing links. These qualities make blog posts downright irresistible to search engines like Google.
Back to relationships
Add to all these great facts about readership and search the passion that people who blog about your company have for what you do.
People who take the time to write about your company — even if it’s an angry diatribe that curses your product or your company’s very existence — care enough to write about your company. If you work to turn the situation around, treat them like they matter, they’ll care that much more.
In the future they will likely turn to you for answers during a crisis out of respect for the person within your company who addressed their experience. They will no longer be content to grouse around on the Internet complaining to anyone who will listen because now they have you — not your brand, but a human relationship with someone inside the organization.
Back to search
Information doesn’t travel in a linear way and neither does this post.
If a journalist searches for your company, and blogs are inherently search engine friendly, would you rather they happen along a blogger who feels they have a personal relationship with someone inside the company, or a stranger in search of an audience?
Stop worrying about whether this or that blogger has a large enough following to warrant a response or whether or not the person fits into the right bucket and simply acknowledge them. With technology, this really can be done.
As usual, I care a lot about what you think and appreciate your feedback. Maybe you think I’m overestimating the power of blogs or, maybe you think there’s a better way to prove why blogs matter. If so, please let me know in the comments or write your own blog post in response and link back to me. After all, isn’t that how this conversation thing is supposed to work?
Seo Article post
Whether anyone likes it or not, social media engagement is really about blogs.
I’m not saying you or your company must have a blog, but building relationships with relevant bloggers and understanding how blogs work is essential to any social media strategy.
What social media engagement really requires is a fundamental shift in how companies approach mass communication. Without this shift — even if it comes about gradually, any attempts at throwing up outposts on Facebook or anyplace else on the web will basically be a waste of time.
The key is not to create a social media check-list with names of social networks or tools that dictates you have a Facebook page and a MySpace page.
Most of the time, companies are filling these spaces with all the same old content they already have on their website. Depending on your objectives, that may be okay, but it’s always better to research and identify ways those spaces, and others, can be used to engage the people who are already there and empower them with the ability to share your message — maybe even reward them for doing so.
To reap benefits of engagement, even those spaces should promote a level of call and response as well as some kind of takeaway for consumers to share within their own corner of the social web. This keeps people interested in what you have to offer.
The monologue is now a dialogue
I know a lot of us keep saying this, but believe me, it bears repeating.
Sure, a good understanding of how these technologies work will come in handy, but companies are better served by understanding how information travels along the social web. Whether anyone likes it or not, information no longer travels in a straight shot from company to journalist to public.
Instead, it bounces back and forth between all three. It’s just as possible for information to swell up from the public to the journalist to the company, or from the public to the company to the journalist. Or from the journalist to the company to the public and back again.
You don’t have time to write a press release and get key messages ready for every little statement companies will be demanded upon to make. Ignoring this will simply make your company look like it’s either out of touch or worse — that it doesn’t care.
People within organizations need to be empowered to have conversations with others on the social web. Does this have the potential to get messy? You bet. Does it end there? Not at all.
The nature of a dialogue is that there are ample chances to clarify and correct your position as you go along. Admitting errors quickly and moving on is a quality we tend to admire in other human beings — we respect this quality in companies, too.
As a side note, I’ve used this example before, but if you need a good visual for how information travels along the social web, check out David Armano‘s Influence Ripples. I like it so much, I even carry around one of his business cards with the image on the back just so I can it to show people at parties.
What may be shocking to some (especially those in the technology sector) is that in many industries, companies still don’t think blogs are important.
Q Who reads blogs?
A Journalists
If for no other reason, companies should pay attention to blogs simply because journalists do.
More than three quarters of journalists see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles, and insight into the tone of an issue, according to a study conducted last year by Brodeur, a unit of of Omnicom Group in conjunction with Marketwire. I found out about this study from a post Valeria Maltoni wrote on her blog.
This fact proves that information journalists receive from blogs helps them know what questions to ask, what are the hot-button issues, anecdotal evidence of consumer attitude, etc.
If you don’t think this is important, you’re not seeing the big picture.
Another item to consider is that blogs, by their very nature of regular updates, incoming and outgoing links, are very search engine friendly.
Q Who uses search? (i.e. Google, Yahoo!)
A Just about everybody… but also journalists
The most commonly referenced figure is 92 percent. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project March 2007 report, 92 percent of journalists use search engines to research story ideas. This means that they are not searching their inboxes looking for your press release. They know how to find information on their own.
What does search have to do with blogs?
Blogs automatically archive old material, they’re regularly updated, chock full of content as well as incoming and outgoing links. These qualities make blog posts downright irresistible to search engines like Google.
Back to relationships
Add to all these great facts about readership and search the passion that people who blog about your company have for what you do.
People who take the time to write about your company — even if it’s an angry diatribe that curses your product or your company’s very existence — care enough to write about your company. If you work to turn the situation around, treat them like they matter, they’ll care that much more.
In the future they will likely turn to you for answers during a crisis out of respect for the person within your company who addressed their experience. They will no longer be content to grouse around on the Internet complaining to anyone who will listen because now they have you — not your brand, but a human relationship with someone inside the organization.
Back to search
Information doesn’t travel in a linear way and neither does this post.
If a journalist searches for your company, and blogs are inherently search engine friendly, would you rather they happen along a blogger who feels they have a personal relationship with someone inside the company, or a stranger in search of an audience?
Stop worrying about whether this or that blogger has a large enough following to warrant a response or whether or not the person fits into the right bucket and simply acknowledge them. With technology, this really can be done.
As usual, I care a lot about what you think and appreciate your feedback. Maybe you think I’m overestimating the power of blogs or, maybe you think there’s a better way to prove why blogs matter. If so, please let me know in the comments or write your own blog post in response and link back to me. After all, isn’t that how this conversation thing is supposed to work?
Seo Article post
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