Blog SEO Tip #3: Tagging
A tag cloud and tag pages are a blogger’s secret weapon. I can’t believe how few bloggers do this. I’m not talking about Technorati tags, although those are useful too. I’m talking about using a plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is exactly the plug-in I installed to create tag pages like this one.
So now, if I want to target a new search term in the search engines, I just start tagging some posts with that search term and, presto!, I’ve got text links everywhere pointing to this new tag page (notice I’ve put a tag cloud globally at the bottom of every page so such links are ubiquitous throughout my blog). And of course I made sure the tag name is mentioned at the beginning of the title tag and in the body copy! I’m going to further optimize the tag pages by adding some keyword-rich intro copy to each tag page, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.
Blog SEO Tip #2: Your URLs
Dynamic URLs can impede the search engine spiders from fully spidering and indexing your blog. Err on the side of caution and use “rewritten” URLs. The excellent (and free!) blogging software WordPress supports URL rewriting, so you can have nice, search engine friendly URLs. Better still, the WordPress URLs contain hyphens rather than underscores (like TypePad uses), since underscores are not considered to be word separators by Google.
If you ever switch blog platforms, it’s imperative that the old permalink URLs still work. That’s because there will be numerous deep links into specific post pages in your blog from other bloggers, and that provides your blog with that all-important “link gain” (e.g. Google’s PageRank). You wouldn’t want to lose that!
Recently we assisted BusinessBlogConsulting.com with the conversion from TypePad to WordPress 2.0. As part of the migration, we ensured that the new WordPress permalink URLs were consistent with the old TypePad permalink URLs. That means that the old posts still have underscores in them. However, for new posts, the permalink URLs will contain full words and hyphens not underscores.
If for some reason you have to change the URLs, then at least redirect the old URLs to the new ones, and make sure you do it as a permanent (301 style) redirect. That way the link gain passes on to the new URL.
Also make sure you 301 redirect requests for pages from your domain without the www (e.g. http://businessblogconsulting.com/category/adverblogs/) to the corresponding page on your www URL (e.g. http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/category/adverblogs/). This will eliminate duplicate pages in the search engine indices and consolidate link gain. Otherwise when people link to http://businessblogconsulting.com without the www it creates another site for the search engines to visit and explore.
Blog SEO Tip #1: Your Title Tags
From an search engine optimization perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. It gets the most weight by the search engines.
Most blogs don’t have search engine optimal title tags. (Heck, most sites in general don’t have optimal title tags!) The best title tag is one that LEADS with the targeted keywords. But unfortunately most blogs lead with the name of the blog. Instead that should go at the end.
We just did some optimization to BusinessBlogConsulting.com and I’m happy to say that’s now the case there: the blog name is at the end.
In addition, it’s good to customize the title tag of your home page to have some good keywords in them. For BusinessBlogConsulting.com that meant including phrases like “corporate blogs” and “business blogging” and including both singular and plural forms “blog” and “blogs”, as well as the verb tense “blogging”. (The old title tag was “Business Blog Consulting”. Now it’s “Business Blog Consulting: Everything about Corporate Blogs and Business Blogging”)
Creating a custom title tag for your blog’s home page is well worth doing. Consider this: on this blog I decided to target the search phrase “web marketing blog”. By simply changing the home page title tag from “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings” to “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings: Web Marketing Blog” and adding a mention of “web marketing blog” once in the body copy, I went from nowhere for “web marketing blog” in Google to currently #8 out of 55,200,000!
That’s an important point, by the way: Make sure the keywords you are targeting aren’t just in the title tag but also in the body copy as well. Otherwise it’s not reinforcing your keyword focus to the search engines sufficiently. On BusinessBlogConsulting.com we just added “corporate blogs” to the home page title and body copy. Hopefully I’ll be able to report back soon that BusinessBlogConsulting.com is highly ranked for “corporate blogs”!
UPDATE: BusinessBlogConsulting.com is now on page 2 in Google for “corporate blogs”. Not bad for a couple minutes of effort!
Top 20 list of WordPress plugins for bloggers
I’ve posted onto BusinessBlogConsulting.com a list of my favorite WordPress plugins and what they do and why I like them. If you’re blogging under the WordPress platform, you might want to trick out your blog with some of these great plugins.
The list includes: PodPress, Popularity Contest, Google Sitemaps Generator, Akismet, Adhesive, Ultimate Tag Warrior, EmailShroud, Transpose Email, WP-EMail, WP-Print, Subscribe2, In-Series, Permalink Redirect, Gravatars, Subscribe to Comments. WP-Notable, A Different Monthly Archive, Related Posts, Related Posts for your 404.
That’s not quite 20, so I’ll add one more to that list — a suggestion from commenter Neville Hobson (thanks, Neville!) — FeedBurner Feed Replacement, which makes it easy to “migrate” your pre-existing RSS subscribers over to Feedburner once you sign up for the service (which is excellent, btw).
Branding online: search engines, blogs, podcasts, wikis and more
I spoke at the Strategic Branding conference in Auckland yesterday. My session was on new ways to brand in the online channel. Of course branding campaigns appear in many forms online besides the ubiquitous banner ad. It was my job to provide the audience of brand marketers a crash course in blogs, RSS feeds, paid search, natural search, contextual advertising, text link advertising, microsites, and podcasts, and to do all that within an hour! Well I managed it, and I have the information-packed slide deck to prove it. Feel free to download the PPT.
Duncan Shand has some nice coverage of the conference sessions here.
What should be your corporate blog’s URL?
A reader emailed me with the following question:
I was wondering if you have a POV, on if a blog should live on a corporate domain name (ex. company.com) or if it would be better to have the domain name be different from the corp. (ex. companyblog.com)?
That’s a great question.
My answer is this: if the blog will get more links by being at an arm’s length from the corporate site, then I’d have it on a totally separate domain.
Let me supply a hypothetical example… If a life insurance company has a blog about health and wellness and it’s at www.stayinghealthy.com, that will garner many more links than one at blog.lifeinsuranceco.com, IMHO.
This may seem like an oversimplification, since I haven’t discussed the branding implications, but I believe the “link-ability” of the blog is what will give the blog a long productive life in the blogosphere. Anything else is peripheral.
New way to follow and join Internet conversations
Now here’s another great little service I’ve recently discovered.
Say you’ve just released a news story, blog post, product page or any other web page, hopefully people all over the Internet are talking about it. And you’d like to keep track of all those conversations, right?
TalkDigger will help you find, follow and display conversations evolving around a subject (URL). It works like this: If you want to know who is talking about you, copy the URL, paste it in the TalkDigger search box at TalkDigger.com and hit “Dig it!”
TalkDigger then returns results from various search engines, all of which contain a link to the URL.
Having access to these conversations is a truly powerful tool for webmasters and bloggers, and online marketers can discover what people think of your new product — its strengths and weaknesses. Pretty neat, eh?
Hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang for this one.
Blog and RSS Feed Search SEO
Today I presented at the Search Engine Strategies conference on the “Blog and Feed Search SEO” panel. I spoke on optimization tips and tactics for blogs and for RSS feeds. I had to pack in a lot of material into a short amount of time, but I managed! We got some great questions in the Q&A. The session was blogged at Search Engine Roundtable.
Feel free to download my Powerpoint deck. There’s tons of great stuff in there. Over 50 slides.
My child SEO prodigy already seeing her SEO work bearing fruit
It’s been less than 2 weeks since my 14-year-old daughter Chloe built and SEO’d her first website, a Neopets Cheats site. And already she’s #16 in Google and #17 in Yahoo for her main targeted search term: “neopet cheats”. That was pretty fast considering the only link to it was from my blog. According to a linkdomain: query on Yahoo, there is one additional link now besides my blog, but it’s just from a splog where they siphoned off Google or another engine’s results pages that contained Chloe’s site.
This got me thinking: this was a bit too easy. The way that Google and Yahoo favor blogs, no wonder splogs (spam blogs) have become such a problem. And as long as it continues to be that easy, splogs will continue to be a scourge on the Internet.
Fast forward to the Year 2020: Jobs in search and blogging
You’ve probably heard it before, that the vast majority of the jobs that our children will hold when they grow up haven’t been invented yet. But what you may not have heard yet are some example future job functions being postulated.
According to the Office of the Future: 2020 report, these new roles will include:
- Virtual Meetings Organizer
who will help employees schedule conferences and set up the required cameras, projection systems, electronic whiteboards, meeting software, audio equipment and related tools - Contract Resource Coordinator
who will bring together the right contract workers for a given project, like a movie producer assembling a cast, camera crew and production team - Information Integrator/Abstractor
who will collect, compile, and index text, data and images so this content can be searched in a variety of ways
It was this last role that most intrigued me, since I am a search geek after all! I just imagine a scene from The Minority Report where the Information Integrator waves his/her hands in the air purposefully and talks to a computer while within a virtual world of information projected onto the back of his/her retinas. In this world he/she categorizes schemas for datasets, slices and dices incoming datastreams into more manageable segments, gives directions to an AI to do further categorization on its own, and so on.
As a business blogger, I also got to thinking that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the “Information Integrator/Abstractor” of the future.
Think about this, what does a business blogger do but the following:
- identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
- take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
- ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
- cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
- republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world
Sounds like a plausible job description for an Information Integrator/Abstractor of the Year 2020!