Internet Marketing, Web Design, SEO, Web 2.0 Optimization
Posts tagged blog optimization
Blogging for Business
35 months ago
Blogs make up a large portion of content on the internet. Their presence is large enough that it cannot and should not be ignored. A good SEO specialist will know how to incorporate blogs into good web 2.0 optimization strategies.
Blogging
History of Blogs
In December of 1996, Jorn Barger started a daily log of what he thought would be interesting Web links. He called it, “Robot Wisdom Weblog.” It didn’t take long for other online publishers to start creating pages with these types of frequent, but short posts which end up being in reverse chronological order. In 1998 the first online tool which allowed users to keep online journals was developed and made public. That is when the online journaling world pretty much took off. In 1999, one online journaling author, Peter Merholz, took Jorn Barger’s word, “weblog” and split it out to make the phrase, “We Blog.” It did not take too long for users to begin using blog as a shortened form of weblog.
Types of Blogs
There are literally blogs on virtually everything imaginable; and some on things that aren’t! But if you could reduce it all down to two categories you would find that there are basically two types of blogs: personal and business. Many personal blogs are like personal diaries that are used to journal day to day happenings of one sort or another. Some may be simply opinion posts including those of a political nature.
Business Blogs
And then there are business blogs. These can provide a multitude of benefits for the business world. They can actually be an intricate part of the business’ online presence; and can even be incorporated into a business website’s SEO strategies. For the business, they can mean an essential tool in today’s web 2.0 world.
A business blog can be a very efficient way to use this social media platform. Because of new technology, a blog can allow a business to interact with clients in real time. It’s also much faster to enter a blog post on a regular basis than to update the website every few days. They are a very effective way of sharing your expertise with a much larger audience.
A business blog impacts how web users evaluate, recommend, promote and share information about products and services. Blogs also have a large impact on how companies listen to clients and engage with them to help ensure success. Blogs have many benefits such as helping to establish credibility, provide a resource for clientele, develop new business relationships and provide a communication source. But there are also some benefits in terms of SEO.
SEO Benefits of Business Blogs
Blog posts are updated much more frequently than websites as a general rule. This fresh content is one thing that search engines love to look for and blogs provide plenty of it. The blog is viewed as a great resource and many people may link to your blog or website for a reference. By integrating your business blog with your main business website blogs can help build links back to the site. These backlinks are beneficial as search engines use them in determining a site’s value.
Hiring an SEO Company for Blog Optimization
Optimizing a business blog is imperative to its success. The blog can be incorporated into the web design of the main website. While keyword rich content is a large portion of blogging, it is not the only SEO technique available. For the business blogger it is important to consider hiring a New Jersey SEO company to optimize the business blog.
SEO Tips for Blogs
238 months ago
Image via Wikipedia
You may not realize this, but each new blog post you write sings the song of search engine marketing. That’s because every time you write a new blog post, you are creating a fresh opportunity to rank well for another search term. The reason for this is that every blog post is a new web page, and web pages (and NOT websites) are exactly what search engines dish up to users when they type in key terms.
First, you will want to select the right blogging platform. There are many blogging sites to choose from, but we personally recommend WordPress for its intuitive interface and vast assortment of SEO plugins. After you select your blogging platform, you should take the extra step needed to own your domain. Say, for example, that you are running a non-profit called Annie’s Helpers, and you want to create a blog to help drive traffic to your non-profit’s website. The difference between blogging from annieshelpers.wordpress.com and annieshelpers.com/blog is that with the former, you are creating inbound links to someone else’s property, which is problematic because should you ever decide to switch platforms, you will unfortunately lose all the inbound links you worked so hard to build up over the years.
There are two factors that affect your blog’s search engine ranking: 1) on-page optimization, and 2) off-page optimization.
As mentioned in one of our earlier posts, the first step in on-page optimization is identifying your internet marketing keywords. What terms are your potential clients typing into search engines? Are your keywords geo targeting such as: SEO firm in NYC? These are the keywords that you will want to optimize your web page for. Again, keep in mind during your research process that you want to pick the keywords that have high search volume but low competition.
To learn about off-page optimization, be sure to check out our next post.
SEO Tip # 8 Blog Optimization
61 year ago
Image via Wikipedia
I would like to welcome you to my eighth SEO tip of the day; here I will discuss the importance of optimizing your blog.
Blogging is a fantastic tool which can help to greatly improve your sites’ SEO and with which you can get your site to rank for many more keywords, but as with everything else in life proper optimization of your blog can increase the benefits of blogging.
When optimizing a blog there are a few things that you should look at, the first of these is the title of your blog, your blogs’ title should describe the main purpose of your blog (what will you be blogging about), it should also be something that people might Google and if possible be catchy, for example, a good blog title for a kids blog might be “Kids Birthday Parties NJ”. The second thing you need to optimize your blog is to add the proper widgets (I like to use, tag cloud, category cloud, blog roll, recent posts…) These widgets help by generating numerous internal links between blog posts and create automated links for every new post you write. The third thing that you need to optimize your blog is for you to optimize the title of each blog post; a blog post’s title should be descriptive, clear and preferable something that people may Google, since the title will be the primary way that search engines list blog posts. (If you wish for your title to sound cute you should make sure that it still describes the topic of the post).
What Does Unique Content Mean?
31 year ago
Looking at all of the things that you should be aware of in the world of SEO, few are more important than unique content. Although this term can be somewhat elusive, ignoring it can get your site or blog punished or even banned by Google.
The issue of unique content normally arises when talking about blogging, ex: I read a blog post that I like, and I decide to copy/past it onto my blog, or someone send me a guest blog post which I post, not knowing that this post was not original (unique), in either case I will be punished by Google. If this is something that I do not do often on my blog than what is likely to happen is that that post will simply not get indexed, or will get indexed and will be given much lower weight in search engine results, but if this is something that is done repeatedly on my blog than the likelihood is that Google will delist my blog and will no longer index it. If your blog or website gets delisted by Google it is possible to get this reversed but it will take time (often years) and is not easy. For any would be bloggers out there my advise is for you to not copy existing content! If you see a blog post that you really like, link to it on your blog, and write something about why you think this is a great post, or, if you really like the content in the post you can rewrite the material so that it is unique.
Another concern when it comes to unique content is the use of quotations, in many graduate writing courses it is acceptable to have 30% of a paper be made up of quotes, and as long as these quotations were cited properly your essay would be seen as “original” and not plagiarized, but Google is not your grad school English professor! Google does not distinguish content based on the use of quotation marks, otherwise I could copy an entire article from anywhere and simply put it in quotes, and that would be OK. It is of course OK to copy small parts of other articles (with proper citation) and if you are a prolific writer it is possible that you may accidentally write a sentence here and there that already exists somewhere on the web… not to worry, for this you will not get punished; for the sake of defining unique content for Google, content is unique if 80% of it is unique. For example, this blog post is about 400 words, meaning that it would be OK for me to include a direct quote here that is about 80 words, and by doing this I would not be in violation of posting non unique (duplicate) content.
About tags and categories
12 years ago
Looking at SEO for blogs, another very important way to ensure that your blog posts appear in Google and that they rank well is to include both tags and categories with each blog post. (Most blog platforms give you the option to add categories and tags to each blog post, I strongly urge you to take advantage of this option!)
There are a number of reasons for the importance of both tags and categories, first, these help create an internal link structure to your blog, so all blog posts with the tag “Search engine optimization” are placed in a single category, and can be seen in that category and searched… Additionally, many blog platforms show top categories and tags in a number of placers other than your blog, so by placing proper tags and categories on your blog you can also get excellent referral traffic from your blog platform as well as from other websites that may index categories and tags of that blog platform.
Not all blogging software is created equally
02 years ago
This blog is a guest blog post that was contributed to us by, Phyllis Zimbler Miller. We hope that you find this blog post useful. If you have any comments as to the content of this post please leave your thoughts in the comments section.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the co-founder of the Internet marketing company Miller Mosaic, LLC. Download her free report “Twitter, Facebook and Your Website: A Beginning Blueprint for Harnessing the Power of 3 for Your Business” at www.MillerMosaicPowerof3.com
If you are blogging to promote your brand, book or business, you need to make sure that your blog enables you to get the maximum search engine juice.
What do I mean by this?
Not all blogging software is created equally.
Without going into a long discussion of hosted (such as blogger.com and wordpress.com) and self-hosted (such as wordpress.org) blogging platforms, I do want to offer a cautionary note:
In reviewing a blog set up by a client on iWeb, my business partner and I were surprised to see that the content was not visible in the site’s page source, which meant that the search engines couldn’t read the blog’s content and thus index it. (To check your own Web site or blog, go to VIEW on your browser and then click on page source.)
Thus this client, who has a very interesting blog, is missing out on search engines indexing his content and sharing it with people who search for terms related to his content.
Now I admit I’m not familiar with iWeb. The Apple Web site states:
“A Mac and iWeb. That’s all you need to design and publish your own personal website.”
Thus I’ve been puzzling why a blogging platform would be offered that is not effective for content being found on the Internet.
I’ve concluded — and I may be totally incorrect here — that this blogging application was set up for people who only want to share their posts with family and friends.
But the problem is that unsuspecting bloggers who want a much bigger readership may be pouring their hearts into iWeb blogs without realizing that their efforts cannot be rewarded by the search engines.
The bottom line? If you are blogging to promote your brand, book or business, make sure that the blogging software you use enables your content to be indexed by the search engines. Otherwise you are losing out on a very large potential readership.
Blogging For Dummies
42 years ago
In case that you are new to this blog, or have over looked my other blog posts dealing with blogging, let me repeat myself, I am a huge fan of blogging, and I believe that the proper use of a blog can do wonders for your SEO, although when it comes to actually properly using a blog that is a whole other story.
Blogging
At this point there are probably millions, if not tens of millions of blogs on the web, these blogs cover all issues imaginable and can range from a company news blog, to a blog on a specific product, or for a specific company, take the Picone Painting and Design blog, to blogs that cover an issue, take the Employment Law blog. But the fact remains that most blogs aren’t optimized, and most bloggers do not take advantage of blog specific optimization tools.
Doing SEO for a blog is very similar to doing SEO for websites, you need to have proper tags, backlinks etc… The difference is that with a blog you are likely to need a widget In order to set up your Meta tags… and link building is a bit easier b/c a “blog roll” is typically included as a default feature when you set up your blog. A blog roll is a tool bar that is located on the right, or left side of your blog (depending on the template you choose) and where you can list all of your favorite sites, blogs etc… so that these links will appear on the side of each page on your blog, and on the side of each post you publish. Since most blogs these days have a blog roll, contacting other bloggers and asking them to trade links is that much easier.
Finally, as I am often prone to do, I’ve left the most important secret of a proper blog to the very end of this blog post (am I a tease or what?) The most important part of a good blog, of a blog that will deliver good results and will drive targeted traffic to your primary site… is to have good content! I cannot stress this enough, (and this is something that many of the millions of blogs out there are missing) but the content you choose to post will make or break your blog! The content you post should be original, and most importantly interesting to read (those of you who like this blog can see that I put much effort into providing my readers with good information while also giving good anecdotes and being entertaining). If you are going to post a video, make sure to include an explanation of that video as a foreword to the blog post; if you are posting a picture, make sure that you include ALT text, a caption… And it goes without saying; make sure that each and every blog post contains tags and categories!
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