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
Saturday, January 22, 2011
You've Got Facebook why blog?
I got a really good question last week via twitter/email and after yesterday's twitter problems, it's appropriate to address this now. Here's what I was asked:
From your perspective on blogging, what's the advantage of actually doing a blog, over having a well-developed page on Facebook--where you not only share regularly updated status reports, but can also post Notes (where I imagine what would have been posted to a blog would be posted on Facebook), can easily share media, engage people in conversation and relationships, and organically have your updates propagated to other friends' pages, etc.?
It's an excellent question and one that does come up in some form when I speak and teach.
First, let's look at what happened on Twitter. Yesterday, with no explanation for nearly 4 hours, hundreds of thousands of legitimate twitter accounts were suspended citing "suspicious activity." People on Facebook, FriendFeed and blogs went nuts.
OMG! We can't communicate with our followers!
I admit that I got a bit freaked out too when I discovered my account had been suspended when I tried to retweet a client's blog post and got a big warning message. That was before I knew that so many other accounts were suspended. Once it became apparent that it wasn't just me, I calmed down. Within about four hours most accounts had been restored and all was good again in the world ;-)
But what if this happened on Facebook? I have many colleagues whose accounts have been shut down with no warning or explanation. It took weeks to get a response and get their accounts reinstated.
This is why I "preach" that your blog is your hub. It's your home base. It's where you want to drive all that social traffic ... to a space on the web you own and control. Yes, of course something could happen to your server and shut down your site, but at least you're in control.
You are not in control of what happens on Facebook and twitter. Those sites do not belong to you and you are at their mercy. What if you had spent tons of time building a fan page, posting content via the Notes app, building your list of friends and fans, etc. and one day Facebook shuts down? Now what? You may have lost everything if that's you're only home on the web.
Many smart people call social networking sites "satellites" or "outposts." Chris Brogan has an excellent post outlining what he calls "a simple presence framework" where he talks about using your outposts to socialize and connect and then gently guide people back to your home base (blog!).
Ultimately, my goal is to have content that is so attractive that people will want to trade their email address for a free report, video course, etc. I connect socially on Facebook and twitter (and I have a presence on many other social networking sites as well) having conversations and sharing links to my content. Occasionally I promote a teleclass or new product or use an affiliate link to promote something a colleague is offering.
I drive people back to one of my blogs where I can get more intimate and share more information in depth. This helps prospective clients get to "know, like and trust" me, which may entice them to go to the next level and request my free report or buy my product. Once they do that, they're on my email list. They've said "yes, I want to know/get more from you."
New people find out about me every day on Facebook and Twitter, and as they watch, listen and interact, they decide whether or not to follow me home (to my blog). If Facebook or twitter were to disappear, poof! -- without a blog and an email list, all my friends and followers would be gone. But because my primary connection points are via my blogs and I frequently offer valuable content and programs, I would not suffer (too much!) if Facebook or twitter disappeared forever.
As Mari Smith says in her post about lessons learned from the twitter incident:
Twitter [and Facebook] is only one platform for visibility, branding, community building and connecting. It’s vital to your social media success to be diversified and have a) a built-out Facebook profile (unless you’re choosing to only use your profile for close personal friends/family), b) a built-out Facebook Fan Page, c) an active blog with increasing subscribers, d) an active account on LinkedIn with increasing contacts e) an active channel on YouTube, f) an active, built-out account on FriendFeed… and many, many more platforms.
And here's a two minute video where I talk about your blog being the hub of your online activity.
From your perspective on blogging, what's the advantage of actually doing a blog, over having a well-developed page on Facebook--where you not only share regularly updated status reports, but can also post Notes (where I imagine what would have been posted to a blog would be posted on Facebook), can easily share media, engage people in conversation and relationships, and organically have your updates propagated to other friends' pages, etc.?
It's an excellent question and one that does come up in some form when I speak and teach.
First, let's look at what happened on Twitter. Yesterday, with no explanation for nearly 4 hours, hundreds of thousands of legitimate twitter accounts were suspended citing "suspicious activity." People on Facebook, FriendFeed and blogs went nuts.
OMG! We can't communicate with our followers!
I admit that I got a bit freaked out too when I discovered my account had been suspended when I tried to retweet a client's blog post and got a big warning message. That was before I knew that so many other accounts were suspended. Once it became apparent that it wasn't just me, I calmed down. Within about four hours most accounts had been restored and all was good again in the world ;-)
But what if this happened on Facebook? I have many colleagues whose accounts have been shut down with no warning or explanation. It took weeks to get a response and get their accounts reinstated.
This is why I "preach" that your blog is your hub. It's your home base. It's where you want to drive all that social traffic ... to a space on the web you own and control. Yes, of course something could happen to your server and shut down your site, but at least you're in control.
You are not in control of what happens on Facebook and twitter. Those sites do not belong to you and you are at their mercy. What if you had spent tons of time building a fan page, posting content via the Notes app, building your list of friends and fans, etc. and one day Facebook shuts down? Now what? You may have lost everything if that's you're only home on the web.
Many smart people call social networking sites "satellites" or "outposts." Chris Brogan has an excellent post outlining what he calls "a simple presence framework" where he talks about using your outposts to socialize and connect and then gently guide people back to your home base (blog!).
Ultimately, my goal is to have content that is so attractive that people will want to trade their email address for a free report, video course, etc. I connect socially on Facebook and twitter (and I have a presence on many other social networking sites as well) having conversations and sharing links to my content. Occasionally I promote a teleclass or new product or use an affiliate link to promote something a colleague is offering.
I drive people back to one of my blogs where I can get more intimate and share more information in depth. This helps prospective clients get to "know, like and trust" me, which may entice them to go to the next level and request my free report or buy my product. Once they do that, they're on my email list. They've said "yes, I want to know/get more from you."
New people find out about me every day on Facebook and Twitter, and as they watch, listen and interact, they decide whether or not to follow me home (to my blog). If Facebook or twitter were to disappear, poof! -- without a blog and an email list, all my friends and followers would be gone. But because my primary connection points are via my blogs and I frequently offer valuable content and programs, I would not suffer (too much!) if Facebook or twitter disappeared forever.
As Mari Smith says in her post about lessons learned from the twitter incident:
Twitter [and Facebook] is only one platform for visibility, branding, community building and connecting. It’s vital to your social media success to be diversified and have a) a built-out Facebook profile (unless you’re choosing to only use your profile for close personal friends/family), b) a built-out Facebook Fan Page, c) an active blog with increasing subscribers, d) an active account on LinkedIn with increasing contacts e) an active channel on YouTube, f) an active, built-out account on FriendFeed… and many, many more platforms.
And here's a two minute video where I talk about your blog being the hub of your online activity.
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