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Blogging for SEO: How to Write a Blog for Google!

Blogging for SEO

Source:  Rob Neu

Get Your Blog Noticed

It seems like a lot of bloggers, and people in general really, have a bit of a negative view when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how to utilize it to be one of the top entries of a search results page . It seems that lately opinions are moving in a more positive direction. I think this is awesome because SEO can really help bloggers get their content noticed. Ranking well in organic search is one of the best ways to share your voice with a larger audience and increase your authority on a given topic.

The goal of this article is to help bloggers understand that SEO is simply a tool, not the mystical black art that many have sold it to be. When you do SEO right, it really doesn’t need to impact your writing much at all. Once you learn the basics, it just sort of becomes something you do naturally without having to think about it very much. The places where most bloggers struggle are keyword targeting, strategic link-building, and technical SEO. Technical SEO is indexation problems, meta issues, and most of the other things that our SEO audits address.

None of these things should change the way you write significantly. Keyword targeting can be as simple as doing a bit of research to make sure you mention the right words a few times throughout your posts. Technical SEO sounds complicated, and can be sometimes, but if you’re a blogger using WordPress, chances are it’s actually a lot simpler than you think. Strategic link-building can be a bit tricky, but as a blogger you have a distinct advantage over other website owners in this area. Bloggers can update their site and display new content very quickly. Search engines love this kind of activity.

Harness Your Blog to WordPress

Facts don’t lie. As of this writing, WordPress powers over 38% of the Web. It is by far the most widely-used content management system and it continues to grow in popularity every year. It should be noted that this is the self-hosted version of WordPress, which is WordPress.org not WordPress.com. WordPress.com is a great place to get started, but if you’re serious about blogging and SEO you should consider self-hosting.

In addition to being popular, WordPress is also a very SEO-friendly CMS. Without doing anything extra, simply using WordPress will improve your chances of ranking. This is because it has a lot of basic SEO functionality, such as pretty permalinks and contextual page titles, built right in.

Moving to WordPress is (Usually) Easy

There are a lot of importers for WordPress that let you move your content from other systems like Blogger and Tumblr built right in. There’s also a bunch of great plug-ins and an entire guide to help make the transition to WordPress easier. One area that might be a bit of a challenge is choosing a new design for your site once you’re up and running. Lucky, there are tons of great free and premium WordPress themes for you to choose from.

Integrate Basic SEO Into Your Blogging

Once you’ve got your blog running on WordPress, you need to start thinking about integrating some basic SEO best practices into your blogging work-flow. A good place to start making some changes is in your keyword targeting.

Over time, you’ll start naturally writing your posts in a more search-friendly format, but when you’re getting started it’s best to do these things AFTER you’ve finished writing. When SEO isn’t familiar to you, focusing on it right out of the gate will just slow down your writing and frustrate you. Try to put it out of your mind until you’re done writing and think of it more as part of your editing work-flow.

You should also keep in mind that your SEO title and your meta description are going to be the way people see your post in the Google search results. Because of this, they need to be attention-grabbing. Getting this right is critical for convincing people to click on your post. A great title can even outdo a higher ranking in some cases, so definitely spend some time thinking about improving your headlines.

How Do You Know Which Keyword to Choose?

Choosing the right keywords for your posts is another area where most people struggle. Many times the title of your posts might not be exactly what people are looking for on Google. As you do this more, you’ll start to develop a bit of a 6th sense for choosing keywords, but starting out it can be a little tricky.

Don’t let this section intimidate you or stop you from optimizing your posts. Google is pretty smart and they’re getting smarter all the time. If your content is good enough, they’ll frequently rank you for the keyword you should have targeted if it isn’t something that’s super competitive.

That said, in a perfect world you’d always be optimizing your content for the ideal keywords. In order to get a little closer to that, you can use a few tools to get an idea of what people are searching for on Google.

Keyword Research is Hard, but Worth the Effort

In order to pick the best keywords, you need to do a little research. There’s a tool from Google called the Keyword Planner that will let you see how many people are searching for a particular group of keywords. The problem is it’s difficult to come up with variations on your original idea to see what might work best. Luckily, there’s a simple tool called Ubersuggest that can give you a ton of ideas to test in the Keyword Planner. Here’s a guide on how to use Ubersuggest.

Spending 5 or 10 minutes doing this can mean the difference between targeting a high competition, low volume keyword or targeting a low competition, high volume keyword. It’s hard to get into the habit of doing this, but if you take the time to learn it, you’ll understand the benefits pretty quickly.

Google also has another useful tool called Google Trends which lets you see the overall interest in a keyword or a topic over a period of time. This can be a good indicator for whether a keyword or a topic is worth focusing on. Keyword research is a pretty vast topic and it’s also one of the cornerstones of SEO. Don’t feel bad if you have trouble with it, you are far from being alone. Just chip away at understanding it a little at a time.

Participate in Your Community

Being an active blogger gives you a number of distinct advantages over other website owners. As a blogger, you probably already have a group of people you interact with and talk to online on a regular basis. This is a huge advantage! Keep track of where these people are hanging out on the web.

Stay active on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in particular, among the Social Networks. All of these things mean that whenever you publish something related to WordPress, it’s pretty much guaranteed to get a lot of eyeballs and pull in a decent amount of links.

You need to do the same thing in your industry. Start searching for things related to your industry and follow the top results to find where everyone is hanging out. Find the popular blogs, see which social networks everyone is most active on, and pay particular attention to any forums your community is using.

Start leaving comments, talking on social channels, sharing your own content as well as the content of others, and posting in forums. Don’t spam anyone, but don’t be afraid to jump into the conversation either. Once you’ve established yourself in the community a little bit, don’t hesitate to start asking people for links when appropriate. If you’re a genuine person and you’re not just trying to leech off the community, you’ll be surprised how responsive and helpful everyone is.

Keep Track of Your Progress

If you’re not already using Google Analytics, you really need to start. Analytics can get pretty complicated and probably deserves an entire post of its own. That said, there’s a number of simple things you can look for in your analytics to help you keep track of and improve your blog’s content and SEO efforts. First of all, you’ll need to set up and install Analytics if you haven’t already. This guide does a good job explaining how to set up analytics and you can use this plugin to add analytics to your blog.

Rinse and Repeat

One of the biggest mistakes people make is they give up too early. The things outlined in this post take time! You can’t just target a few keywords, send a couple emails, and check analytics a few times if you want to succeed. You need to keep at it.

Don’t stop after you optimize a post or two. Do as many as you can! Go back into your old content and optimize it. Keep doing keyword research and learn how to anticipate what people will be searching for in your field. Keep your finger on the pulse of your community so you can be one step ahead of everyone and create content that people are thirsting for. You can do it! It’s not has hard as it seems, just keep working all the time and eventually you’ll get there.

Dennis Roeder

Contributor #markethive

 

The info shared here has not been evaluated by the FDA and is not intended to diagnose, cure or treat any illness or disease.

How to Blog for SEO: Write Blog Posts to Rank Well

SEO Page Rank

You are probably writing a blog hoping your ideal customers/prospects will find it.

Some simple changes that you can make to help you with your campaigns will be found in this article. You can increase your search engine visibility, drive more traffic to your blog and generate more leads or sales for your business.

Focus on keyword-rich subjects.

Why are blog sites a tool that are is so powerful for SEO (search engine optimization) and online visibility?

Because every post you compose becomes another web page, and every web site is another chance to rank well for a search that is a specific client is performing at this time. Or in 30 days. Or in a year. Because good, evergreen content continues to attract visitors to your website or blog for decades, producing more leads/customers for your offer.

There are a number of techniques to create tips which can become content for your website:

  • Turn consumer concerns into “Dear Abby” style posts.

  • Scour websites like Quora, Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn or other forums where you can find questions to help solve.

  • Simply take some keywords through Google Keyword Planner that you’d like to rank well for and run them. This device is free for you to find how many individuals are looking for your phrases each month, recommends associated phrases that might be better opportunities, and lets you know just how competitive that search is. (The higher your competition, the tougher it will be to split the page that is to begin the search engines.)

Create a keyword-rich title.

By default, the title of your post becomes the title of your web page.

Search engines give more importance to your page title than just about any other variable.

Too often, businesses give blog posts vague titles like, “A Word to the Wise,” or “A Lesson from Man’s Best Friend.”

Unfortunately, your ideal customers aren’t searching for those phrases. And if they are, they’re probably not interested in your post specifically.

Here are some tips to title a blog post for maximum visibility:

  • Lead with your keywords. Search engines give more weight to the first few words in a title. Examples might include, “Pinterest Marketing: How to Generate Leads from the World’s Hottest Social Media Site,” or “Men’s Bowler Hats: What’s Hot This Season.”

  • Number your lists. I know many people hate numbered lists, but they speak to how busy we all are. “101 Ways to Save Money for College” or “3 Questions to Ask in a Job Interview” are generally more engaging, and will generate more click-throughs at the search engines, which may increase your overall rank.

  • The colon is your friend. If you have a couple of competing keyword phrases that both seem appropriate, use a colon (or some other spacer) to cast a wider net. Do you write an Asian cooking blog? Try “Chopstick Instructions: How to Use Chopsticks.”

Work your keyword phrase into your copy early and often.

Your title is critical, but it can’t stand on its own; it needs to be supported by the rest of your copy.

You should work your keyword phrase into the first sentence or two of your blog post, and then repeat it several times throughout your post.

If you feel it’s difficult to work your keywords into the first sentence, try this trick: open up with a one to two sentence overview of your topic. If you still can’t work your keyword into the overview, then your blog post probably isn’t about your keyword anyway.

Warning! If you overuse your keyword phrase it can backfire. This is called, Keyword stuffing.

Google and other search engines may punish you for “over-optimizing” your post.

How much is too much? There’s no magic formula, but if your post doesn’t read well and the keywords feel forced into the rest of the copy, you’re probably guilty of over-optimizing.

You can also break up your keywords. If you wanted to rank well for some certain phrase you could use that phrase exactly once or twice, but also use each word separately in other sections of the blog article.

Share your post through social networks.

Inbound links—links from other websites and blogs—increase your search engine visibility, all other things being equal. However, links from social media sites and the comments section of blogs often carry the “no follow” link, meaning no search engine benefits are being transferred.

The search engines are a little cagey about how much impact social buzz has on their search results, but there’s no question that Facebook powers Bing’s customized search, and Google+ affects your Google search results.

By sharing your post through these and other social media platforms, and getting others to do the same, you’ll drive more traffic and build awareness of your post. Even if a tweet or a LinkedIn update doesn’t boost your overall ranking, it might introduce you to a blogger who links to your post from within a post, which does carry search engine weight.

To encourage more sharing, be sure to add any appropriate “share” buttons to the top and bottom of your blog posts, encouraging visitors to share your content.

Transfer your blog’s search engine visibility to your website or e-commerce store.

Blogs are often more conversational, less sales-y than a traditional website. The non-sales-y approach often encourages other bloggers to link to you, where they wouldn’t normally link to a business website or e-commerce site.

However, your goal may not be to have the most popular blog, but rather to build your business. If you’d like to leverage your blog to grow your business, you’ll want to create keyword-rich links from blog posts to sales pages on your website.

A blog post about tips for growing tomatoes in a home garden might link to your page that sells tomato seeds. A post about finding the right nursing care for an aging parent might link to your page on transitional services for families.

Search engines focus on the words in links, so instead of creating a link that says, “click here” or “learn more,” you’ll want to create a link that says, “heirloom tomato seeds” or “transition plans for aging parents.”

By creating multiple blog posts—including leveraging guest blog opportunities—that point to a given page on your site, you can increase the search engine visibility of any web-page you wish.

Be the master of your own domain.

There is a huge following for WordPress blogs, however, never run a business blog with the WordPress.com domain. Or Typepad.com. Or Blogger.com.

When you blog on someone else’s domain, i.e., gardenshop.wordpress.com, you’re building their search engine visibility, not yours.

Many blogging platforms have gone under in the past few years. You might be able to save your blog posts from the wreckage, but you’ll never recover all your inbound links and the trust you built up at that domain.

It’s critical to your success that you blog at a domain name you fully control. This could be part of your current site, i.e, gardenshop.com/blog, or it could be a separate domain entirely, i.e., gardenshopblog.com.

Conclusion and Summary in a Nut-Shell:

To create a blog that generates search engine traffic and new leads for your business, follow this simple formula:

  • Build your blog on a domain you own and control.

  • Focus each blog post around a narrow, keyword-rich topic.

  • Create a title that starts with your best keywords.

  • Use your keywords early and often in your blog post.

  • Make your post easily shareable through the social networks.

  • Leverage your blog’s new-found search engine power by linking to critical pages on your website or e-commerce store.

Based on an article by: Rich Brooks

Dennis Roeder

Contributor

 

The info shared here has not been evaluated by the FDA and is not intended to diagnose, cure or treat any illness or disease.

LinkedIn – To Open Network Or Not

As an avid LinkedIn user, and as a member of the LinkedIn Open Networkers group (aka LIONs), it is a question I see being asked on LinkedIn and at other social media platforms and services on a regular basis. I actually think that the answer is more varied than simply the two options of "open networking" or "closed networker," and your individual answer depends on you and your objectives in creating a LinkedIn profile.

linkedin training

LinkedIn system

The reason that the question exists to the extent it does, is that LinkedIn has created an online network which at its basic level is fundamentally different to any other Social Media network. LinkedIn positively discourages members to connect to those that they do not know and have not met. They even enforce the systematic structure by making supporting statements in both their terms and conditions as well as their User Guidelines. This is in stark contrast to the social side of others online networks which most will be more used to in the form of Facebook, where chatting and connecting to people who seem to be much like you is part of the whole ethos.

But, and here's the crucial difference: LinkedIn users have an average household income of over $140k, with 80% over $75k, the spammers would see an open network as list building shangri-la! Further, when 60% are senior executives and 90% are college educated, it would mean that any affiliate or direct sale would inevitably come with a high commission return.

LinkedIn market

Hence from a market trust view point, making it difficult to connect is ensuring just that: consistent, believable and hence trusted online networking. Further, that is what LinkedIn's target audience want. They are not used to the fast moving and Farmville-powered coffee corner that is Facebook. They want something more akin to a select and stable club, where one can mix with like minded people, and then be introduced by acquaintances when mutual needs which are mainly business orientated arise.

LinkedIn networking

So, what options are there between open networking and closed networking which can be adopted by LinkedIn users? Firstly, lets be clear here: there is no such thing as closed networking on any social network, including LinkedIn. If you choose to be wholly "closed" in your networking, then you wouldn't even have a LinkedIn profile, let alone connect to known friends whom you work with directly or meet with on a weekly basis. You choose to join a club or network and stay there because it gives you a professional marker post in a popular place, and opens up opportunity on both a personal, professional and business level.

But on the other hand, nor does truly open networking exist. If you were truly open, then you would accept every invite that any "profile" sent to you. The reason I mentioned those statistics about LinkedIn at the start of this piece, was because however difficult a systems designer makes connecting to others, those membership statics much like the challenge of stealing the British Royal Crown Jewels or the Mona Lisa from Paris will always attract ambitious opportunists.

While as a recruiter and CV writer I never encourage non-artiste job applicants to place a photo on their CV, in online networking one of the first signs of a spamming profile is the lack of profile image, or use of one that you may have seen once or twice before: its amazing how many photos of Rod Stewart, Bono and Sir Tom Jones are available! Then there are the names, most often three letters as that is the minimum LinkedIn will allow; or the incomplete profile records of both education and work history: one term at Harvard and a three months on Wall Street doesn't fool anyone!

So in reality, everyone is the same type of networker, but at different points along a line of how much trust they require to develop in others before they decide to offer to connect.

List of Social Networking Sites

This is a quick list of social networking sites, which can be used for traffic generation, or just getting your name out there for marketing and credibility.

Facebook – This was developed for the collegiate market and later expanded to professionals as these people graduated from college. The interface is clean and crisp, without a lot of extraneous stuff. It allows people to connect with others in their own network. It offers a profile and several ways to market yourself to your friends, although you are not allowed to spam marketing hype on your profile or elsewhere. It has many applications you can add to boost your profile or add marketing features to your profile.

LinkedIn – This social networking site has a far more business-like and professional flavor. It is noted for helping people network to find new jobs or business opportunities.

Squidoo – This site allows you to define your brand and even promote and market products. It is more of a marketer's social network and is based on the creation of lenses that are focal points of interest that you want to highlight about your personal expertise or your business.

Twitter – A social networking site with minute-by-minute updates, if that's what you like. It's unlike the other sites, but hugely popular, particularly for mobile phone updates.

By the way, do you want to add a LinkedIn coaching program to your business? If so, join me in Markethive and I will introduce you to someone who provides training. There is no cost to either of these. Good luck.

If you believe that my message is worth spreading, please use the share buttons if they show at the top of the page.

Stephen Hodgkiss
Chief Engineer at MarketHive

markethive.com


The info shared here has not been evaluated by the FDA and is not intended to diagnose, cure or treat any illness or disease.