Making Your Blog SEO Friendly – Part 4
Last time we talked about Link Exchange programs and Blog Proliferation as tools for your workamping business. Before I continue with the next topics, let’s revisit those two briefly with a little expanded information.
I mentioned that cross exchanging links with other sites is not very effective, even when the other site is relevant to yours. You can make it a bit more effective if you can get the other sites to put your link somewhere besides a link directory page. The search engines, and especially Google, don’t seem to put much value in back links coming from a link directory page. Not that they don’t help at all, but they may not be worth the effort. The search engines grade a link on how hard it is to obtain and give you credit accordingly. Link directory pages are easy to get. One way links embedded in a legitimate page is much harder. Are you seeing the pattern now?
That’s why writing quality articles that will get picked up and used by other sites is so important. Whenever another relevant site “borrows” your article and puts it on their site it’s like they wrote about you on a page of their site. Your link is embedded in a page full of high quality content because you wrote it. Even better, it’s one way. You aren’t linking back. Are you seeing the pattern here as well? This, by the way, is one of the things that make blogging such a powerful weapon in your workamping arsenal. Because someone took the time to hand create the content of a blog post, the search engines value it highly.
The Magic Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is all the rage right now. Everyone is throwing that phrase around to describe everything from totally ugly sites to YouTube. Whenever a new innovation comes around, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and labels it Web 2.0, even when it isn’t. What is Web 2.0 anyway and how can it help us as workamping bloggers? We’ll spend another article, or maybe a whole series on Web 2.0 at another time. For now I just want to give you a quick overview of what you should be studying and using it for.
Web 2.0 basically describes the newer innovations in dynamic web sites. Web site technology, like everything else technological has gone through an evolution. Early web sites were little more than online letters consisting almost entirely of simple text on a page. Graphics really helped and are probably responsible for the first explosion of the web phenomenon. Web 2.0 is the term applied to the next big leap in that evolution. It mainly applies to interactive web sites – sites that incorporate interactive media like dynamic graphics, audio or video, customized or adaptive user experiences, etc.
This is important to us because the search engines recognize the popularity of these sites and rank them higher because of it. Sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc. can be useful in getting your site noticed by the search engines. They don’t do you much good as far as monetization goes, but that’s another article. For the purposes of this article, we like them because they can be used to link back to your site. MySpace, for example is ranked 9/10 by Google. So it is beneficial to get a MySpace page and add a link to your web site to it. The search engines will pick that up and credit you for it. Better yet, get all your friends to do the same. When many people on a social networking site like MySpace or FaceBook have these links to your site, your credit goes up. To that end, make videos and put them on YouTube, Google Video or Amazon as well. Then you can link back to them from your site and let YouTube provide the bandwidth. Also, you can enclose these videos or podcasts into your articles and make them more desirable. Producing these videos and uploading them is an entire article series in itself as well. Keep reading, we’ll cover all of this in more detail as fast as we can.
Get Socially Networked
One of the easiest ways to get your blog onto the social networking sites is to start your own accounts and link to your site from it. While I recommend you do this from several of the more popular sites, having others do it too is even better. You can make it easy for your readers to do this by including social networking quick links at the bottom of your posts. Fortunately, Wordpress makes this easy for us as well.
I use The Sociable plug-in from the Wordpress.org site and I prefer the Sociable Zyblog Edition. The easiest way to locate it is to do a Google search for Sociable Zyblog Edition. The Wordpress.org plug-in page should come up at or near #1 on Google for that key phrase. Download it, install it, activate it and configure it to include your favorite social networking sites. The instructions are good and the plug-in is easy to follow. Once that’s done your readers can easily click their favorite icon and share your site.
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly – Part 3
One of the most important things you need to make your web site enticing to the major search engines is high quality back links. Back links are links from other web sites to yours. They’re best if they come from high page-ranked sites, contain your targeted keywords in the alt tags and are one way. Reciprocal links, links where they link to you and you reciprocate by linking back to them are okay, but one way links are better.
So, how do you get back links to your web site. There are dozens of methods. There are also dozens of Internet Marketers out there that claim their system or product can do it for you “automatically” or “while you sleep” or whatever. While it is true that some tools are helpful, and even a few are worth paying for, most are just over-hyped reworks of tools that are already available to your free. In the next few articles I’ll try to briefly cover a few of the methods I use and why. We’ll expand on each of these with more detail in upcoming articles.
Link Exchange Services
Link Exchange Services are online services that you join to make exchanging links with other site managers easier. A quick Google search on “Link Exchange” will reveal hundreds of these services, many of them free or at a very small cost. How do you choose? What you want is quality and relevancy above all else. The search engines give you the most credit if the back links to your site are from high quality sites that contain content relevant to your own. If you’re blogging about fishing in the upper Midwest, it won’t do you a lot of good to have back links from gambling sites or sites that sell Chinese pseudo-Viagra. In fact, it may even hurt your ranking. But having back links from sites that have something to do with fishing or other outdoor sports will help tremendously because they’re viewed as relevant by the search engines.
Personally, I’ve used a couple of the pay services in the past. They’ve helped and did boost my rankings, but I’m not sure it was helpful enough over the free sites to make much of a difference. I’m experimenting this time with WorkFromYourRV.com. I’m not using any of the paid services. Instead I’m using all free link exchanges and relying on blog proliferation to get it done for me. In that respect, we’re on this journey together and we’ll see how it works.
Bottom line … link exchanges are a small part that can be beneficial to your overall effort to rank high with the search engines. However, it is only a small part.
Blog Proliferation
The entire point of a blog is to attract readers. Duh! That is also an excellent way to get back links to your site. Many of you are probably reading this article from somewhere other than WorkFromYourRV.com. That’s because I make my blog articles available to the public at large in a variety of ways. I have an RSS feed that syndicates my articles, not only to many of my readers, but to other services that attach my blog entries to other peoples sites. In addition, I upload my blog articles to article services where they’re made available for search and download.
There is another complete segment of the “make money online” market out there that will teach you to set up blog sites in which you don’t have to write a single article. Instead, you scrape relevant, on-topic articles from other sources and include them in your blog. That’s a perfectly legitimate business niche and someday I’ll run a series of articles on how to do this as well. I don’t feel it’s as effective as writing your own material, but then again, it’s easy and you can maintain many more sites using this method.
Those types of sites have to get their material from somewhere and that’s where you come in. Publish your articles through RSS and to the article directories. Make them available for free use and they’ll get picked up and spread over the internet in no time – especially if you write substantive articles.
The reason this benefits you is because all these article services allow you to put a byline at the bottom where you put links back to your site. These links become quality one-way links to your site from other sites. The best kind!
I’ve had my best luck with EzineArticles.com. They are the most restrictive, but seem to get the most attention because of it. Every article you submit to them must follow strict guidelines and is reviewed by a human being. That makes them more difficult to use, but highly respected. About 75% of my articles that I receive back links from come from EzineArticles.com. If you’re only going to bother with 1 article submission site, go with them.
A couple more sites just in case you want more. I also use ArticleAlley.com and GoArticles.com. GoArticles.com will even let you put links directly in the body, so if you embedded an affiliate link, as I sometimes do if it’s relevant, they’ll even let that pass. EzineArticles.com won’t. There are many more, but these are the ones I use most. You can experiment with some of the others, but just watch your traffic sources to see how they’re helping, if at all. We’ll cover how to tell where your traffic is coming from in another article series.
That’s enough to keep you busy for now. We’ll continue with this subject next time.
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 2
In the last part I promised to explain what Real Simple Syndication, or RSS is and why it’s important. Let’s do that now before we go further.
RSS is an Internet protocol used to publish frequently updated content. Actually, it a family of competing protocols, but more on that later. RSS allows you to “subscribe” to, or “syndicate” content on the internet such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, video, etc. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you use an RSS reader to get that content automatically whenever new items are published. In some ways, it’s like being on an emailing list. RSS documents (which are called a “feeds”, “web feeds”, or “channels”) includes full or summarized text, plus information such as publish dates and authors.
RSS feeds are great for bloggers because they allow us to syndicate and deliver our content automatically. They benefit our readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from our websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software usually referred to as an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”. These readers can be web-based or desktop-based. By using an RSS reader, it isn’t necessary to actually visit the web site to read it’s latest content. I personally use Google’s RSS Reader because I can make it a widget in my iGoogle page.
How to Put RSS to Work For You
You can use RSS for many things, but the 2 most important for a blogger are building a reader base and providing additional dynamic content on your web site.
First, building a reader base. Notice the subscribe box at the top right corner of my web page? That’s my invitation to syndicate my content and read it in either your favorite RSS reader or in your email. When visitors click that link they can subscribe to my feed and get all my blog entries as soon as they are published. Building a strong reader base is important. I personally use FeedBurner for all my RSS feeds. It’s a great service and it’s free. Remember I mentioned there really wasn’t a single RSS standard? That’s one of FeedBurner’s strong points. It can syndicate your feed in such a way that almost anyone can read it regardless of the RSS reader they use or its protocol. I don’t have to worry about it, FeedBurner handles it. I highly recommend you get a FeedBurner account, play with it, learn how to use it and syndicate with it. Once you’ve done that, add a subscribe block to your site similar to what I have and start building that reader base. FeedBurner has tools to help and there are several free Wordpress modules and widgets that can help you build that block.
Second, you can use RSS to add additional dynamic content to your site. This not only makes the search engines like you more, but it can be a beneficial service to your readers. A great example of this is the CONTRIBUTORS CORNER section of my web site at CoolRVToyz.com. If you go there and look you’ll see blog articles that relate to RV’s and the RV lifestyle. These are written by a variety of other bloggers that syndicate their blogs via RSS. I use a module to subscribe to their blogs and display them on my site. My members get a great service by being able to read a variety of RV-related articles, the bloggers benefit because I’m providing them additional exposure on my site and I benefit by having additional, constantly changing content on my website. Win-Win-Win.
One of your goals should be to get other bloggers to pick up your feed and put your blog articles on their site. This gets you that additional exposure and also gets you additional backlinks from their site to yours. Back links are another very important part of SEO, but that’s a subject for another article.
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 1
Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 1
This is just one article in a series of articles on how I make my living online by working from my RV anywhere I decide to park it. Read the entire series and you too could be well on your way to living any lifestyle you choose with complete financial independence.
Now that we have our blog monetized, we need to make it palatable to the search engines. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a huge subject. There are people that make a very good living specializing in being a search engine expert. So obviously, this blog isn’t going to even scratch the surface. But I can get you started and point you at some great products and materials that have helped my tremendously.
Here is a checklist you can use to cover the main points you’ll need to cover in your blog. These aren’t all-inclusive of course, but they’re a great start.
Optimize Your Web Site for the Search Engines.
This is a complete study all in it’s own. This is a great place to start however because you usually only need to do it once. Here you can get a lot of information on the Wordpress website and in the documentation to the various SEO modules available for Wordpress. These have a lot of great tips on making sure your title tags, descriptions, keywords, etc. are all set up correctly. Of course, if you’re willing to spend a little money and don’t want to go through it all yourself, there are a few commercial themes and blogging systems that I’ve tried in the past and have had great luck with. One is Blogging to the Bank 3.0 by Rob Benwell. He has some free themes and a great ebook that is a lot of help. I learned a lot from his product and system and it was a relatively cheap education. You can read a review on my Pure411.com site here.
Another great product is Carl Ocab’s Ultimate Blogging Theme. I recently bought his product and liked it so much I’ve switched this site over to it. I haven’t even had time to write a review yet, but I will be. Carl got started at 13 years old and now makes a great living purely as a blogger. Part of it is his theme. His site consistently ranks on the first page of Google for the keyword he’s targeted.
Regardless of whether you choose to do it yourself and set up a free theme to be SEO friendly, or if you purchase a proven theme, you need to make sure you make all the correct changed to it. This takes education. The best place I’ve found so far for that is Gideon Shalwick and Yaro Starak’s new site. This is probably the best place I know of to learn exactly how to get it done right so you can maximize your income from your blog. I personally rely on it and have purchased a lifetime premium membership. They have a wealth of professionally produced videos, audios and articles that are concise and easy to understand. If you can only afford 1 training product, get this one.
Focus, Focus, Focus.
Know your keywords and focus on a singe keyword with each article you write or upload. Writing scattered articles doesn’t get you noticed by the search engines. Pick the top 5 or so keywords that you want people to locate you by and focus all your blog articles on one of them at a time.
Post, Post, Post.
This is advice I haven’t been to good at taking myself sometimes. The search engines like dynamic sites. A dynamic site is one that changes regularly. You don’t want to post multiple times per day necessarily, but you should post at least a couple of times per week. There are tricks to help make your site more dynamic, like using RSS feeds. We’ll cover those in a later article.
Don’t be Mediocre.
Write good articles. Don’t just throw something on line to keep the site dynamic. Your readers will appreciate getting REAL and accurate information. After all, your free information is your service to your readers. If they don’t take time to stay on your site and read your articles, they won’t come back, and they certainly won’t visit your affiliate links. Remember: Quality, not just quality.
In the next few posts we’ll continue this theme and present even more ways to get your blog noticed by the search engines and everyone else. For now, this should keep you busy.
