Tag Archives: SEO

Blogging

24 Ways To Repurpose Your Content – My Way!

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A couple of years ago on a different blog I wrote an article talking about re-purposing blog posts. That post was more about internal linking by making sure to take old blog posts and add those links to newer posts to help enhance the SEO benefits of new content.

In this instance the concept of re-purposing content is more than talking about blogging. Most people have something that they’ve written previously somewhere on their computers. What they forget is that much of what was already written would make great blog posts or articles to put on their websites. If you’re looking for a lot of content and don’t have the time to write something new, going back through old files could provide you with what you need.
Continue reading 24 Ways To Repurpose Your Content – My Way! →

Research, SEO, Web Stuff

Does More Blog Content Work Anymore? Research Results…

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I have long been someone who’s believed that the more one writes on their blog, the more traffic they’ll get, the higher their blogs will rank, and the better opportunity they’ll have to be more popular across the board. That certainly used to be true; back in the days where I was writing more than 300 posts a year on this blog it was very highly ranked. Once I slowed down, my ranking dropped, which has happened to all my long time blogging friends who have reduced how much they put out.

it´s not the style ...
ifranz via Compfight

What I didn’t know was whether this was still true. I’ve certainly said it was, the last time being in July when I said that “the more you write the more traffic you’ll get and the higher you’ll rank…“. I didn’t have any information telling me that wasn’t true.
Continue reading Does More Blog Content Work Anymore? Research Results… →

SEO

How Important Is SEO In Your Blogging Content?

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I hear a lot of excuses from people when it comes to why they don’t blog all that often. Although I tend to believe that people have more to say than they think they do, I can understand how someone might think they’ll run out of things to say.

How to seo a website
SEOPlanter via Compfight

What I also hear is that people have no idea how to write for search engines, or the all-important SEO. I thought it was time to address the question of just how important SEO is to your blogging content.

Is SEO important? Yes, it’s absolutely important. How important it is in one’s blogging content is a different question entirely.

There are times when making sure that certain keywords are prominent in a blog post. One of the benefits of blogging is the fact that you’re actually building up prominence for your topics, or keywords that you want to be known for, by having a lot of content rather than having to keep drilling down on specific keywords or keyword phrases. So you shouldn’t have to go out of your way to create those keywords or keyword phrases if you know what you’re talking about.

For instance, even though I’m using the term SEO often in this particular post, if I decided to only use it once in any other post and linked that one time to something else on either my blog or my website, it would have as much power for my website as mentioning it in one post multiple times. The fact is that I have written on the topic multiple times on this blog throughout the years, so I should be covered, especially if someone’s wondering how it might relate to blogging.

In other words, the SEO properties of a blog don’t have to occur all in one post. One can spread out the process via multiple posts. That also means that your content can read naturally for both your visitors and the search engines, which is what everyone wants to see anyway.

Of course you will probably go somewhere else and read where someone has said how important it is to make sure that every single post you write is perfectly optimized. I’ve read lots of blog posts where they’ll tell you how many times you need to use certain phrases, that you need to add H1, H2, H-etc tags, and a whole lot of other tricks. Go find some of the big time blogs and check to see how often they’re employing these tricks within the articles; almost never!

I’m here to tell you that it’s much more important having consistent content than worrying about how you’re writing something. As long issue make it readable for your visitors, make it compelling, and have a style worth reading, your content and your search engine optimization processes will take care of themselves.
 

SEO

Marketing When Your SEO Seems To Be Failing You

8 Comments

Back last April Google put through a couple of corrections in their search engine protocols that seemed to hurt a lot of websites in some fashion. Their intention was to clean up their algorithms so that their search results were not only more accurate, but to penalize those websites that they somehow deemed as having a lot of keywords or spam-like characteristics. They also took a look at links back to websites and started taking away some authority from websites based on the quality of who was linking in to them.

tres claves para un buen SEO
Carlos García Torrado via Compfight

Whenever something like this happens, the crowd goes on a lemming rampage and starts decrying SEO tactics as something that won’t work anymore and some people even start saying that people who say they do SEO services are taking advantage of everyone else.

I’m here to tell you that’s not true across the board. In reality, some people are either always sneaky or always honest; the only middle ground is being somewhat incompetent, recommending things that search engines don’t even look at anymore as major SEO components.

Here’s some truths.

First, the basic principles of SEO will always be valid. I’m not mentioning them again because the tips are in the article I linked to.

Second, if you purchased links you knew whether they were good or not, so that’s on you. If you didn’t purchase links that’s a different story. I know that my main business website has more than 8,500 links from sources that I never submitted that site to, and a lot of them are questionable. However, I don’t have the time to reach out to that many sites, so if Google decides they’re lousy sites, there’s really not much I can do about it.

Third, if you’ve written your content well, and you’ve made sure that you haven’t overused your keywords and keyword phrases on all pages, then you should be fine. However, if you have, and you’ll know if you have, then you need to put some corrections through to fix that.

Fourth, and this is an interesting one. If your website or blog has a lot of links, you might have to perform some maintenance and check for broken links. Turns out that a lot of blogs got hit badly because of that one.

The rest of your marketing, if it’s solid stuff, will still do you well. I look at my main website and even though traffic has dropped to the blog after the updates, I’m still ranked highly for the keywords on the site that I’ve worked hard to get there. Other keyword phrases have fallen, but as long as the main ones still work, it shows that my marketing campaign for them was legitimate.

Unless your traffic drops in half, don’t panic. Just put some time into looking at your sites, maybe fix a few things, add a little bit of new content if you can, and you’ll be heading in the right direction in no times.

By the way, last Wednesday I interviewed a friend of mine, my oldest friend, Chuck Price of Measurable SEO on many topics, the biggest two being entrepreneurship and SEO; how timely. Here’s that video; you should check it out:

 


 

SEO

Having Guest Posts On Other Blogs As A Traffic Strategy

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Guest posting is a strategy that you might have read about on some blogs or in other online spaces as a way to drive traffic to your website or blog. It can be, but I’m not one of those people who thinks it’s as good as having great content on your own site. Still, with the right type of guest post on the right blog in front of the right audience, it might not be a bad idea across the board.

Wind farm and greenhouse gas farm, together

Kevin Dooley via Compfight

To guest post, you have to be willing to follow the rules of the site owner. I used to allow guest posts on my finance blog when I had it, and I had some rules that had to be followed. Unfortunately, many people weren’t following the rules, and I didn’t have time to keep up with what I was seeing that I had to stop allowing them.

Anyway, here were the main rules:

One, if someone requests a guest post, they had to put my name in the email so I know they saw the guest posting policy;

Two, the topic had to be financial;

Three, the post couldn’t be blatant advertising;

Four, I got to decide if the post would be free or had to be paid for based on my criteria;

Five, all guest posters must respond to comments within 2 weeks, otherwise any links in their posts would be deleted.

My rules were tough, but that blog made money for me and I set the standards for its use. I think every person allowing guest posts needs to have standards; otherwise, you end up with a lot of junk and a blog no one ever wants to visit.

You need to be ready to really give your all. A guest post isn’t a reason to write a throwaway post that you’d never put on your site If you’re hoping to drive people back to your site it needs to be top quality.

If you have someone else writing for you, that’s fine as long as you look at what they’re submitting in your name. If you trust your writer it’s all good. What I see happening most of the time is the person reaching out to a site to submit a guest post isn’t actually the writer but a marketer for a content company of some sort. They almost never read the posts either; if they did I’d never have to edit anything. Those guest posts are a reflection on your business so be careful.

If your website isn’t up to snuff, or your blog’s content is weak, then you’re just wasting your time linking back to it. I’ve seen some horrid sites that people want to link back to and sometimes I just said no without even allowing someone to send me an article.

If you have some standards, don’t accept anything you don’t agree with, even if the other party is willing to pay you. I disagree with the concept of payday loans, so anytime I received a pitch with that as the topic and it wasn’t a negative piece about the subject, I turned it down. I would also turn it down if the subject is fine and the article was well written but it linked back to one of those sites.

Guest posting to drive traffic isn’t a bad strategy but it comes with its own issues. If you have problems writing your own blog or web content, do you really want to spend the time boosting up someone else’s traffic with the hope of getting some residual traffic back? Pick your spots and it can work out; get it wrong and you’ll just be spinning your wheels.

BTW, just to add this, but I don’t accept guest posts on this blog any longer; the last guest post I published on this site, and that’s still live, is from December, 2011; that pretty much solidifies my wishes lol