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Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Useful and Unique Content

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3 Jul, 2009
Anne Bolender Edwards
Designing A Blog, Online Business, Technical Skills

Completed So Far:

I now have a list of powerful keywords that I will be effectively scattering through my website. However, as effective as keywords are, every successful blog/website needs quality content. Two characteristics of quality content is that the content is both useful and unique. So, the next task is to start developing some useful and unique content.
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New Developments:

Regardless of what other search engine optimization techniques you use,  having quality content on  your blog is an absolute ‘must have’.

Although quality content generally consists of content that is well written (with correct spelling and grammar), it is, in fact, much more than that. Think of the websites and blogs that you regularly visit. Why do you keep going back to those sites? Usually visitors keep returning to sites, or sign up for subscriptions to the site’s email newsletter or RSS feed, because they find the information on the site useful to them, in one way or another. For example, the site entertains them, or it solves a problem they have, or it helps them learn how to do something, etc.

The other factor that most, if not all, successful sites have is that they are unique – the personality of the author shines through. So, if you have a natural laid-back attitude, let it come through in your site’s content, but if you don’t, then don’t force it. If you have a great sense of humor, let the content of your site reflect that, but, again, if you don’t then don’t force it. Write your content in the style that reflects how you would naturally hold a conversation.

Below are 10 tips that can help you create useful and unique content:

  1. use your own ‘voice’ – make your blog unique by letting your personality through, don’t try to copy someone else’s blog
  2. know your audience – know what their interest’s are, what problems they are trying to solve, what they are trying to learn more about, etc.
  3. be entertaining – people won’t read dry, academic materials
  4. be educational – create how-to articles and posts
  5. be informative – provide useful information on a topic
  6. be practical – provide interviews, case studies, and profiles
  7. provide breaking news – keep people up-to-date with what’s going on in your area of expertise
  8. create a sense of community – ask questions, solicit feedback, generate comments
  9. be inspirational
  10. be controversial

When you create quality content, a great idea is to use both your posts and your pages in tandem to generate the kind of content that keeps people coming back to your site, not just reading your posts on from their email. This is particularly useful if you have affiliate connections on your site, or are selling your own e-books or information packages from your site.

One way of doing this is to create posts that are relatively short, between 250 and 500 words or so. These posts could contain, for example, a brief introduction to an idea or a topic that is more fully discussed in an article that you have published on one of your site’s pages. You could then link the post to the article on one of your site’s page. (Search engine bots and spiders like internal links – more on this in a later post.) The article could be either a static page, or a Word document or .pdf file that you have published on a page. This way, too, the static pages remain ‘evergreen’ - they are easily available as stand alone content that keeps readers coming back to your site to read, while the dynamic posts can be more topical or controversial in nature.

If you are interested in exploring the type of content that can be found on very successful sites, then check out the Technorati website at: http://www.technorati.com, for a list of the Top 100 blogs (based on popularity). Interesting that most of these blogs are informative, useful and unique blogs.
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Next Step:

The structure and format used when writing for the Web is quite different than the structure and format used when writing for other media. The next post, to be published on Monday, will list some of these unique structure and formatting features that writing for blogs and websites require.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog from the beginning by going to the Introduction post.

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Should You Keyword Optimize Your Blog?

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1 Jul, 2009
Anne Bolender Edwards
Designing A Blog, Online Business, Technical Skills

Keyword optimizing a blog can be time consuming, particularly when you’re just starting to build your blog and there are so many other things that also need to be done.

A good question??So, should you spend the time making a list of powerful keywords, doing a keyword analysis, and then integrating keywords into every post and page you write??

The best answer I can find to that question is a resounding ‘maybe’.

There are other techniques (like creating great content and maximizing the effectiveness of links, both of which will be looked at in upcoming posts) that can be used to increase the likelihood of your site ranking well with search engines. However,  you want your site to be found by people searching for information on the topic your site is about, so you want your site to be ranked well by search engines. Using as many legitimate techniques as you can when, particularly when you are just starting out, will definitely increase the likelihood of your site ranking well.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that every single post needs to be keyword optimized.

What I have opted to do with this site is to focus on keyword optimizing everything that is published on the Pages in the site, but not keyword optimize the Posts. Plus I am using Wordpress to create this site with, so I list keywords in both the Categories and the Tags section of each post, so don’t feel the need to optimize the content of the posts as well.

The materials that will be published on the static Pages of this site are materials that will remain on the pages for a while. With the content not changing on a constant basis, it is less likely for search engine spiders or bots to notice it so I build as much spider and bot bait into the Pages as I can, including keywords.

With the Posts, however, I will be changing the content constantly plus making good use of a couple of other SEO techniques, which, hopefully should attract the spiders and bots to the site and generate a good page ranking.

Do you keyword optimize your Blog?? If you do, do you keyword optimize both the Posts and the Pages??

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Using Keywords

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28 Jun, 2009
Anne Bolender Edwards
Designing A Blog, Online Business, Technical Skills

Completed So Far:

My blog is up and running, and beginning to look pretty good. I have developed my list of powerful keywords and keyphrases, and now I will look at where and how to use these keywords and keyphrases.

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New Developments:

You have taken the time to carefully select powerful keywords that not only represent your site, but are also being used to in search engines to find sites like yours.

Now the trick is to effectively use these keywords in ways that help help search engines identify which words on your site are keywords and which are not. Unfortunately, you can’t just tell a search engine which keywords you have used on each page, you have to show them your keywords.  The following guidelines will help you direct search engines to your site’s keywords:

  1. use one primary keyword per page, supported by two or three secondary keywords. Use your list of powerful keywords to select one primary keyword and a couple of secondary keywords for each page of your site. The primary keyword should be placed in all of the major placement spots (more below on these), with the secondary keywords scattered throughout the page’s content. A secondary keyword from one page could be used as a primary keyword on another page (and vice versa).
  2. place your primary keyword in the page’s title and in all headings and subheadings used on the page. If you don’t normally break your content into smaller chunks by using subheadings, you should probably start. More on the usefulness of subheadings in my next post, which will be about “Content”.
  3. place your primary and secondary keywords effectively throughout your content, particularly in, but not limited to, the first few sentences. Don’t over use keywords. An appropriate keyword density is generally thought to be between 3% and 5% of your word count. So, if you have 250 words on a page, between 8 and 13 of those words should be your keywords (or 3 to 5 keywords for every 100 words of content). Keywords should not affect the readability of the copy, they should appear naturally in sentences and paragraphs that are grammatically correct.
  4. highlight keywords by using bold or italics on them, or by underlining them.
  5. place keywords in and around hyperlinks. Never use ‘click here’ to identify an hyperlink. If you can’t place a keyword in the hyperlink, itself, then use keywords around the hyperlinks. Search engines are attracted to links, so will very likely notice these keywords.
  6. place keywords in bulleted lists.
  7. if you use Wordpress to create your blog, use both Categories and Tags to list keywords that are relevant to that post.
  8. use your strongest keyword, the one that is most representative of your entire site,  in the site’s URL, in the site’s name (if at all possible) and in the site’s title and/or subtitle.
  9. remember to keyword optimize any Word documents or .pdf files that you attached to pages on your site.
Beautifully made hand-blown glass fish, hidden amongst the greenery.

Beautifully made hand-blown glass fish, hidden amongst the greenery like powerful keywords hidden on a website.

There are a few other extremely effective places where you can place keywords,  but they involve HTML coding.

Accessing and changing HTML coding on pages, posts and in .pdf files can be a bit intimidating for anyone not used to HTML coding, so I will leave posting about this until later in this series, to when I post on Advanced Keyword Strategies.

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Next Step:

Writing for the web is different from writing for other types of media.  The next post in the series, which will be published on Wednesday, looks as some of the tips and tricks involved with writing effectively for the Internet.

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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog from the beginning by going to the Introduction post.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Selecting Keywords

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25 Jun, 2009
Anne Bolender Edwards
Designing A Blog, Online Business, Technical Skills

Completed So Far:

With everything up and running, I have begun preparing a list of powerful keywords that I can use to build my blog’s content around.

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New Developments:

Keywords and Keyphrases are the words and phrases that people use to search with when they do an online, i.e. Google or Yahoo! search. The more people who search using the same keywords you have used in your blog, the more likely it is that you will have visitors to your site.

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Note:

When using keyphrases, you should limit the number of words used to between 2 and 5 words. Using more than 5 words reduces the effectiveness of your keyphrase.

For the rest of this series, I will be using the word ‘keyword’ to mean both keywords and keyphrases.

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Selecting powerful keywords or keyphrases is not always an easy task but, in the long run, is worth the effort.

Once you have identified the types of pages you will be adding to your blog, and have some idea of the content for each page, it’s time to make a ‘seed list’ of potential keywords that you will build into the content.

Some tips for selecting powerful keywords include:

Brainstorming: Brainstorm possible words and phrases that describe your product or service either by getting ideas from other people, or mind-mapping, etc .

Finding powerful keywords takes some effort

Finding powerful keywords requires a bit of research.

  1. Using Non-specific keywords, that identify general categories, e.g. digital cameras or cars;
  2. Using product specific keywords, that identify specific products, e.g. Nikon D80 or 2005 Honda Accord;
  3. Using location specific keywords, that identify a specific city or region, e.g. Toronto Nikon Dealer, Guelph Honda;
  4. Using word variations, e.g instead of car use truck, van, SUV, or auto, automobile, vehicle
  5. Check out your competitor’s websites, what words or phrases are frequently repeated.

You can usually generate a fairly extensive list of potential keywords just by brainstorming, or you can also dust off the old thesaurus, see what word variations you can use to expand your list with. At this point, you can either begin integrating words from this list into your copy, or  you can go one step further and use a keyword analysis program.

Keyword Analysis Programs: A keyword analysis program determines which keywords people are already using to search for your products or services, and which of these keywords are being used most often. Some keyword analysis programs will even provide you with alternative keywords that can be used instead of your original keyword. Most search engines have some kind of keyword analysis tool that you can access.

At Google there are three tools that you can play with:

  1. Google Search-Based Keyword Tool: http://www.google.com/sktool/
  2. Google Adwords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
  3. Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends

Another great keyword analysis tool is SEO Blogger by Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a company that specializes in keyword tracking, analysis, etc, and offers several ‘tools’ that you can use to do keyword analysis with, some free, some not so free. Free downloadable tools include a Wordtracker toolbar that works with both Microsoft’s IE browser and the SEO Blogger that works on Firefox. Basically the SEO Blogger plugin sits as an icon at the bottom of the Firefox browser page. When you click on the icon, a column appears on the left hand side of your browser window. Just type-in a keyword and the program generates a list of alternative keywords plus an indication of how popular both your keyword and the alternative keywords are. This plugin is very easy to install and use.  You can download a copy of SEO Blogger at http://labs.wordtracker.com/seo-blogger/

Wordtracker publishes a free online tool, Keyword Questions, found at http://labs.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions that is also fun to play with. You type in a keyword and Keyword Questions provides a list of questions that have been used over the past year to research the market your keyword represents. You can easily pull new keywords from the questions listed here.

There are other keyword analysis tools available, like KeywordDiscovery at: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com and ClickTracks at: http://www.clicktracks.com but both of these are subscription-based services and cost to use.

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Next Step:

Now that you have generated a dynamic list of powerful keywords, it’s time to start using the keywords and keyphrases. Monday’s post will look at how to effectively integrate keywords into your blog.

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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog from the beginning by going to the Introduction post.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Introduction

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23 Jun, 2009
Anne Bolender Edwards
Designing A Blog, Online Business, Technical Skills

Completed So Far:

My Blog is now live with a proper URL, I have planned what content I want to put on it over the next few months, and I am now at the point where I want to start developing the content.

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New Developments:

Before I could start working full-tilt on writing and preparing content, I needed to know a bit about Search Engine Optimization, and how to use SEO techniques to help draw visitors to this blog.

Here's a relaxing picture you can come back to if this post starts to overwhelm

It is important to relax when you are learning new skills, particularly when they are as frustrating to learn as developing a blog ;-)

The reason to learn about and use search engine optimization is so that search engine spiders and bots can find, evaluate and rank your website or blog.

When someone does a online search, say on Google or Yahoo!, they usually end up with pages of results listing masses of websites, but only clicking on links to websites they find posted on the first 10 or so results pages. The more optimized your site is, the higher it will be ranked by search engines. This means that your site is more likely to end up on the first couple pages of the search engine’s results when someone searches on the keywords you have used to optimize your site with.

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Resources:

The resources I used for learning about Search Engine Optimization include:

  • the SEO Copywriting Success program from the American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI), located at http://www.awaionline.com. This program’s format includes a set of DVD’s, a workbook and a textbook. The program goes into copywriting a little bit, but the bulk of the information is about SEO skills and techniques. The information is easy to understand and use – even for an absolute beginner.

  • ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, by Darren Rowse & Chris Garrett. This book continues to amaze me with the amount of excellent information it provides.
  • I also used the Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (3rd edition) book, written by Peter Kent, and have Google-searched for information I wasn’t sure of. Both of these resources are also excellent.

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Basically, there are four basic aspects to SEO-ing that bloggers should be aware of, and make good use of:

  1. keywords and keyphrases
  2. developing excellent content
  3. links, links, and more links
  4. advanced keyword and keyphrase strategies

Clicking on any of the highlighted sub-titles will take you directly to that post.

These four topics involve a lot of information, so to prevent you, dear readers, from getting a headache, I am going to further split these four topics into a couple of sections each, and post them individually on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays over the next couple of weeks.

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Next Step:

The first post in this series will be on Friday will focus on selecting the keywords and keyphrases that will start to bring traffic to your blog.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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