How Adding a Blog to Your Website Will Increase Your SEO
Jack on November 4th, 2009 Although your website may be ranking well for specific search engine terms, it’s unlikely it will be able to hold most of these positions for an extended period of time. Why? Well, search engines are looking for up to date information all the time. Users have spoken and they demand to know the latest and greatest.
Installing a blog on your website will help your website’s SEO by giving you a great opportunity for link building. Because blogs are so easy to share and are always evolving, adding a blog to your website will help give something to your visitors besides a static page that hasn’t changed in years. Blogs help build trust in a website by allowing the owners to voice their opinion and easily talk to their audience.
The easiest solution to installing a blog is to add Wordpress to a subdirectory or sub domain on your server. Once you have it up and running with a new template to match your website, choose a particular topic you plan to write about, often you may want to focus on a particular niche. This topic will be what your website does, so if you sell laptops, plan to write helpful and entertaining posts about everything laptops, give your readers so much information that you become the authority on the subject.
Next you will want to do a bit of research to see what people are looking for; you want to target long tail keywords which have less competition than single keywords, these help your SEO by giving you top results for many terms people are searching for now and in the future. After you’ve determine what subjects you plan to focus on and their keywords, it’s time to begin blogging. Try to develop a regular schedule when blogging or if you cannot keep up with the demand, create giant posts that will hold over readers until the next time.
As you write about a new topic each post, these pages will be added to search engines, indexing another page to your website and increasing your SEO for the keywords you wrote about. The other benefit of including a blog is that it gives readers more content to share with one another and the rest of the web, increasing the chances that you’ll gain more traffic. It’s perfectly okay to ask your readers to subscribe to your RSS or Newsletter, which will allow you to keep in contact all the time, creating a recurring amount of visitors.
Blog Promotion
Once you have installed blog you have to do blog promotion which requires a different approach than web promotion. In blog promotion you have to submit your blog to various free Internet Directories, Blog Directories and other free websites. You also need to do Social Bookmarking which will not only be helpful in getting top 10 ranking but also would get you direct traffic.
Remember, blogging isn’t about driving worthless information or products into your readers face, they are expecting helpful and entertaining information. Many ecommerce sites have benefited from including a blog on their website because it helps adds a human element to the company, something for people to trust and more likely to buy from. Installing a blog only takes a few minutes but doing so will help you for years to come with all the additional visitors, SEO and community you build through your blog.
8 Twitter Tips To Increase Visitors
Jack on October 30th, 2009Link building is one of the essential goals of any SEO plan. Leveraging social media has become one of the main targets for any website looking to boost their traffic and engage their community. Twitter has seen a skyrocketing growth since being introduced, however many websites still aren’t jumping on board. If you feel like Twitter isn’t for you, you have another thing coming. Twitter may come across as a platform for people just to post mundane information about their day, but it’s rapidly becoming the go to service to connect with communities and build strong link building. If you have ever thought about starting your own Twitter account to promote your business, now is the perfect time to do so.
The following are 8 Twitter tips to help increase visitors and build links to your website.
1. First, you need to sign up!
Before you can even begin to start Tweeting, you need to sign up! Sign up is simple and fast, so go over to https://twitter.com/signup and create your account. Choose a great name people will be able to recognize you by, this could be simply your website name.
2. Fill out your profile
On your Profile page, you are able to fill in a Bio of yourself. Use this Bio to add interest about who you are or what you do. The great thing about the Bio page is the ability to include a link. When people find others particularly interesting, they love to check out their bios which may persuade them to take a look at your website through your links, instantly more visitors!
3. Find and follow interesting people
There are millions of interesting people on Twitter, however, simply adding all of them isn’t the correct path you should take. You should be using Twitter to find people interesting in the specific topics you write about on your website. Because you are able to identify with these people more easily, they will find value from the links you post, increasing your visitors and helping you in SEO.
4. Answer questions
Answering questions is a great way to have people follow you and build trust. Being helpful with questions and including a helpful link will make people fall in love with you. If you happen to have the answer already on your website, feel free to answer the persons question and give them your link.
5 Add Twitter widget/Follow me link to your website
Because you already have a website, go ahead and add a Twitter counter to it. Additionally, adding Twitter buttons for people to easily retweet articles and posts you’ve made will send them out across the net at lightning speeds. When people retweet your links, people come to your site obviously, which helps your rank and benefits your Search Engine Optimization.
6. Post interesting links people will view
Nobody on Twitter wants click on something that seems uninteresting. Remember, Twitter isn’t all about you. You are trying to share great information with people that they may find interesting or entertaining. Try creating a helpful post on your website and tweet it, include a bit of humor or opinion with each tweet and you should see additional click through.
7. Hold a contest
One of the phenomena of Twitter is the ability to spread information at such a rapid pace. If you were to hold a contest, wither locally or online, use Twitter to help spread the word and allow people to be included in the contest from simply retweeting. Because people are more than willing to participate in a contest through a simple retweet, your contest will reach far more people than you may ever expect.
8. Follow up with Direct Messages
Once you begin to gain more followers or want to talk privately with a person, use ‘DM’. DMing is direct messaging, which allows you to talk to people without it showing up in the public stream. As long as you are sincere with what you say, people may be inclined to take a look at your link and information.
Twitter doesn’t have to be this giant 800lb Gorilla in the room for you; it can be a very great friend. These are only but 8 tips to help use Twitter for link building and SEO, there are many more you will learn as you use Twitter. Twitter isn’t going away any time soon, your competitors may already be on it, so jumping in now is the best choice for you and your link building plan.
4 bad ways for link building which could harm your SEO effort
Jack on October 27th, 2009There are right ways and wrong ways for link building to your website. Using black hat SEO tactics may deliver great results to your website on the short run, but you can never benefit in the long term by using these SEO techniques. Websites that use black hat SEO tricks will eventually be caught and removed from search engine indexes, face possible government investigation and loose trust with its visitors. The following post will help you identify which techniques will bring a bad light upon your website. So try to avoid following link building techniques and always adopt good Link Building techniques for SEO.
1. Forum Spam
Forums are used around the web for users to hold long term discussions about numerous topics. Because forums are a great way to share information and links, companies offer services to include your links on various forums but incorrectly by spamming. Posting your links on forums for the sake search engine optimization and receiving a back link to your website is bad way to gain links and will mark your website as a spammer.
2. Blog Spam
Much like forum spamming, spamming blogs with links to your sites are is a sure fire way to be marked as a spammer and will lead to punishment from the community and search engines. Blogs use comments for discussion, not for an easy way to gain a free link to your website. Practicing correct blog commenting will help you avoid the mistake of building untrustworthy back links to your website, thus hurting your SEO efforts.
3. Stealing Content
Stealing website content will forever be a great no-no for your website. Search engines do not reward websites that have exact content and in fact may punish these websites by removing them from search engine indexes or ranking them lower on search results. You should feel free to create round-up posts of various website content, but you should never completely copy what others have done.
In order to get top ranking you must get unique content written from a good content writing provider.
4. Link Exchanges and Directory Submissions
When your website gains thousands of back links within a short amount of time, your website will be flagged. Websites will build back links naturally through their community or social networking. However, submitting your website to link exchange and directory submission services that post your website link to thousands of directories will harm your search engine optimization. You may see a short term boost in traffic, but search engines are sophisticated enough to know when websites are using illegal practices.
If you want to avoid getting banned for directory submission then you should to natural, organic and 100% manual directory submission which will guarantee you top ranking.
There are many different ways to gain quality back links, but using black hat SEO tactics are not the correct way to do gain them. Avoiding the trap of spamming, stealing content and mass link submission will make sure that you participate with the web community is a safe way. Instead of using these black hat services, link building naturally to avoid the long term punishment to your search engine optimization.
