Thursday 10 June 2010

Blogging Tips for SEO

Now once you have made your standalone blog or integrated WordPress into your website so you have an integrated blog you need to get started. Blogging is generally done for different reasons, that is:-


1. To create a community forum stimulating interest and increasing the awareness of the blog as a brand

2. To increase the ranking of a site in the view of search engines to improve positioning in search listings

If your sole objective is the former then you have far more scope in the way you write posts and so long as they are informative and interesting then that is fine.
If your objective is the latter and it is SOE performance that you are looking for then you will need to adhere to some good practice guidelines.
Firstly, make your posts 250-500 words in length and keep them informative and use original content.

Secondly, for an on site link back to pages on your site and ensure that you use link text and title attributes as part of the link. Then check your landing page for your link and ensure that you have relevant content for your link on the landing page. This is important as the search engine will check the relevance of the link and associate value to it accordingly. I demonstrate here by using the phrase IT leadership and transformation which is on the landing page for this link.

Thirdly, in the day in the life of a professional blogger, you will want to make a post a day of original interesting content.

Fourthly, there are the 3 P's. Make it Personal so people know they have the views of a real person. Work in Partnership to other bloggers putting replies on their blogs and in return they should develop an interest in your blog and reciprocate the gesture. And finally, make it passionate to get the interest of people so they are engaged in your views and want to read on.

Saturday 5 June 2010

Blogger or WordPress ?

If you want a free standalone blog then the 2 major contenders are Blogger and Wordpress. Each have there pros and cons but for a standalone blog then the pendulum does swing towards Blogger. Using Blogger template layouts are editable and you can map domain names for free which you need an upgrade for on WordPress. The other advantage on using Blogger is that your posts will be indexed faster. Whether the faster indexing is due to the sheer size of Blogger or because of the fact that it is owner by Google is up for debate, but it certainly seems to be the fact that indexing is faster on Blogger.
However if you want to integrate a Blog into your website then the tides have turned.
Previously then Blogger had an excellent FTP facility which automatically published comments to your own domain but due to excessive resource for support Google have now stopped this!! As an example this blog used to use FTP publishing but the blog has now been migrated to be hosted by Blogger.
Conversely with WordPress you can install WordPress on your domain and integrate it into your site www.classicalchandeliers.co.uk to see an example.
So if you want a Blog integrated with your site I would recommend using Wordpress.