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Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

I see several blog mistakes everyday from corporate blogs that are not only hurting their search engine rankings, but in other cases making them obsolete. Here are 5 quick tips that can greatly improve your SEO without much effort.

External Blogs: The biggest mistake your company can make is having an “external” blog. The entire idea behind having a corporate blog is to get attention by bringing people to your company to sell your products or services. Why then would you want to bring people to an external site? (company.blogger.com, company.wordpress.com, etc.). You are already paying to host your website. By having an internal blog (http://www.company.com/blog), you will substantially improve traffic to your corporate site because people will be directed right to it. It is anathema to bring traffic to your website from a blog that is not on your website. It is incredibly easy to implement your blog from your own site. Just download the CMS (content management system), i.e., Wordpress, Joomla, Typepad, etc., onto your server in a folder (blog, etc.). It is just as easy to host your own blog as it is for them to host it for you. You are already paying for hosting and 95% of the time it will have a database included.

Blog Titles: Make sure that the (title) portion of the blog page has the title of the article contained therein. I cannot express the importance of this enough. Naturally, your main blog page will have a generic title, but your comments page should ALWAYS have the title of the particular article. This could mean the difference between being on page 1 on Google or page 40. The code for the title is already in your template (blog section). Just copy and paste between your (title) tags.

META Tags: META tags are actually not as important as the title, but are still very important. Although Google does not place much importance on them, a number of other search engines do. The META tags need to have relevance to your posting to improve search engine optimization. These tags should not solely be about your company. When I am writing a blog, I create a special field called “tags” and each time I write a new article I include relevant keywords to the article. You simply place the CMS form tag in your HTML (title) tags. Example: (title)some of the company information(tag or PHP code for CMS for tages)(/title).

Email Field: Almost every blog has an Icon to subscribe to RSS feeds. Most people are not going to go through the work of an RSS feed unless they know you, even though it is a minimal amount of work at best. You need to allow them to just put in their email address and press subscribe. Not only is this extremely simple, it goes right into their email each time you have a new post. Due to time constraints, people are much more likely to read your posts in their email versus going to your blog every day. I use Feedburner.com. It is free, and super simple to use. By subscribing to the free service yourself, it will also ping your blog automatically to other media sites.

Plug It: When you write an article/post, take ten minutes to plug it. There are several free sites out there that give you “instant” search engine results. You do not have to wait for Google or Yahoo to get around to crawling your blog. Search engines already have websites they crawl as soon as they are updated. Technorati, Digg, Twitter, Buzzit.com, are just a few of the networks who will get you on Goggle almost instantly. Not only will pinging and submitting your article give you almost instant Google results, it will also help your website’s SEO because you are going to generate a lot more link traffic, which is one of the biggest factors in getting you listed on top.

All five of these changes you should be able to do yourself or pay a web developer professional to achieve for you inexpensively.

My task is: BLOG ANALYSIS: Create a list of 25 blogs that are publishing content
related to this niche market (bathroom tiles).

There are a couple of good resources your can manipulate to optimize your website for search engines as effectively as possible:

Meta Tags:

Meta Tags contain information that describes your site’s purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. The meta tags are stored within the head of your header.php template file. By default, they are not included in WordPress, but you can manually include them and the article on meta tags in wordpress takes you through the process of adding meta tags to your WordPress site.

The WordPress custom fields option can also be used to include keywords and descriptions for posts and pages. There are also several WordPress Plugins that can also help you to add meta tags and keyword descriptions to your site found within the Official WordPress Plugin Directory.

Robots.txt:

Search Engines read a yourserver.com/robots.txt file to get information on what they should and shouldn’t be looking for, and where.

Specifying where search engines should look for content in high-quality directories or files you can increase the ranking of your site, and is recommended by Google and all the search engines.

Feed Submissions:

WordPress comes built-in with various feeds, allowing your site to be viewed by various feed readers. Many search engines are now accepting feed submissions, and there are many site which specialize in directories of feeds and feed services. Simply Google “submit blog to feed directory” to generate a list of all the top feed directories available on the internet. Some of the are free, while some ask for a fee to add you links within their directories. I recommend manually submitting your blog to free directories, and just give them time to add your links.

Technorati Tags:

Technorati is a “real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs.” According to the site, “Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging. Because Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities underlying these conversations.”

Permalinks:

Permalinks are improvements to your existing URLs which can improve search engine optimization by presenting your post, page, and archive URLs as something like http://example.com/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/ rather than http://example.com/index.php?p=423.  

As search engines use links and the title as part of their information gathering, links to posts and articles within your site gain importance with Permalinks.

Sitemaps and Google Sitemaps:

As of June 2005, Google is now accepting sitemaps of your site as part of their website submissions. Google needs to have this sitemap formatted in a special way using XML. You can use the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress to generate a sitemap for your Wordpress website quickly and easily.

A sitemap or “site map” is a single page listing of all the posts on your website. It is intended for your visitors to get a good overview on what your site is about and to find a blog post quickly but it also has great benefits in the search engines as a good link is always pointing to all your blog posts. By having a link to your sitemap on all your sites pages both visitors and search engines will easily get to it and find all your posts. Also, a sitemap is automatically updated each time you edit or add new posts. This will save you alot of trouble if you have a large website with over 500 posts.

Can SEO companies really have special relationships with search engines like some of them claim?

We are from a volunteer organisation called Voluntour South Africa, when we google the word voluntour, our site is on the first page, but when we google volunteer it is not even on page 20. Can I use a blog URL or title to help the SEO for people using the search term volunteer in SA? or do I use our existing URL www.voluntoursouthafrica.com?

Nick and James from the Creare Group explain the basics of on site optimisation following on from their previous SEO video blog on keyword selection.

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Increase Blog Traffic With Technorati Tags
By gobulldogs

Tag and ping is the hot blog promotion method of the moment. You’ve probably heard about it, but may not know exactly what it is or how to do it. When done right, tagging can bring your site tons of targeted traffic from very active visitors.

The tag and ping concept has its roots in the social bookmarking explosion. More of these sites are being created every day, taking some of the market share away from search engines. The key difference is that social bookmarking sites organize their listings based on the votes of actual people while search engines organize their information automatically according to their own algorithm.

The first step is to sign up for a Technorati account, of course. Next, you need to login to your profile and claim your blog. After entering the blog URL, Technorati will verify that you are the blog’s real owner. They currently have two methods of doing this. You can place a small bit of code somewhere on your blog’s home page or simply input your blog login and password. (Because of privacy concerns, Technorati claims that they do not store this information anywhere.)

Once you’ve claimed your blog, you can set up your profile information, with a customized description and up to 20 tags of your choice. Your blog will be listed when people search for these tags. Like any search engine, you’ll probably be listed lower for the more competitive phrases until you get several incoming links for those keywords.

As you’re writing your blog posts, think about which keywords you would like to “tag” on that page. One of the major differences between tagging and regular SEO is that you can tag several keywords on the same page. Unlike search engines, social bookmarking sites will list your page under different keyword topics.

The goal of these social types of sites is to help surfers find quality sites that are relevant to their search terms, so you can get listed under many different tags. The tag word itself does not have to be used on the page, but you should try to stick with related terms so you don’t get flagged for spamming.

Now you need to add tags to your blog posts. Wordpress has a few useful plugins to help with the tag code and there is similar code available for Blogger as well. With the Wordpress plugin, you can add [tags]keyword, keyword[/tags] while you’re writing the post and you’ll get a list of tags at the bottom. You can also add the [tag] code to words inside your post and they will be added to the list of tags.

When publishing your posts, make sure Technorati is in your ping list and your posts will be automatically be listed under the tags you selected. When surfers search for those keywords, your blog will be listed in the results. If they like your blog, they can vote for it and increase its popularity. Try to focus your tags on the tightest niches possible to get the most narrowly targeted traffic.

As new alternatives to search engine traffic appear, they create new opportunities for clever marketers. Technorati is just one of the vast numbers of social bookmarking sites that have been launched in the past year. Keeping current with these new marketing avenues will help you stay a step ahead of your competitors.

Katherine is the creator of the new SubmitNow! automatic directory submitter and also runs several niche websites. For more tips on speeding up your SEO tasks, visit http://www.lazyseo.com or send a blank email to lazyseo@aweber.com.

Article Source: Articles island – Free article submission and free reprint articles

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Nick and James from The Creare Group take a look at Googles audio indexing capabilities and You Tubes new auto captions feature.