Blogging and Marketing Resources for the Average Blogger and Business
Posts tagged SEO
Free Blog Review by The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit
Jul 16th
A Blog Review to Answer Your Questions
The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit is offering to review your blog – for free! Why, you ask would I want to do that. Well, the benefits are mutual.
First, your blog receives an honest, objective and hopefully helpful assessment of what I see as an average blogger. Next, you’ll receive through my review on the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit, a permanent link back to your blog. A link back to you from another site is one of many ways to help improve your page ranking for Search Enging Optimization (SEO).
My only request is that you make a post on your blog, discussing the review you received on the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit, and return the link back to me. I get some press and some of that good SEO juice.
But more importantly, I get better exposure – at more in depth levels – to additional blogs. Quality engagement and interaction: isn’t that what this is all about?
Your blog must have a specific, obvious and very targeted theme. Reviewing a personal blog of anything that comes to the mind of the blogger is not of any interest for this exercise. I have one of those and it’s just my way of throwing out perspectives.
Violent, prejudiced, hate-filled, or pornographic sites will not be considered. I have no issues with those – 1st Amendment Rights and all. I just don’t want to include them in this exercise. It will be my call on whether I feel comfortable reviewing your site.
A special thank you needs to go to Blog Angel at Blogs With Wings. She gave me the idea for this post and I want to thank her for that. We have exchanged thoughts on topics before and I value and appreciate her insights. Visit. You won’t be disappointed.
If you would like your blog considered, place a comment on this post. I moderate all comments, so if your comment appears, you’re on my list to be reviewed. Check back often to watch for the review. Then, I would appreciate your post discussing the review, and linking back to me.
Best regards,
Dave
Dofollow (No Nofollow) for Improved Search Engine Rank
May 8th
DoFollow Used Here!
A comment offered in a previous post, Entrecard Boosting Traffic, caused me to learn something new, and quite important: the DoFollow / NoFollow dilemma. A new concept for me, but one worth exploring.
First, some background. Blogs and web sites are of course ranked by search engines in a number of ways. One is the number of links from other places on the Internet back to that site. Basically, a show of popularity. The problem with this is the incentive for spammers to comment with nothing but links back to their sites, mostly in automated ways, to simply fill up the comment with opportunities for the Googles of the world to more highly rank their sites. All at the intellectual expense of honorable blogs.
In 2005, Google postulated that if they did not provide any ranking merit when they found the attribute, “rel=nofollow” on blogs, and not follow the link back for merit ranking purposes, bloggers and blog platforms would adopt the setting. The rationale was that it would be a disincentive for spammers and spamming would, well, stop. Right.
WordPress, as one blogging platform, adopted the setting. The challenge for us “average” bloggers on the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit is the lack of awareness of (at least for many of us) this obscure parameter.
I am pleased to announce that the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit is now set up to use DoFollow! The good people at Semiologic provided the DoFollow plugin now used here. Anyone familiar with WordPress plugins will appreciate the simple ZIP file download and install. Now, the dreaded NoFollow setting has been disabled!
As an alternate view of this link juice topic, the folks at eVisibility provide an excellent visual example of how the flow of link juice occurs. Their point is different, in that they are discussing the value of using or not using NoFollow strategically – I just like the graphics.
As a topic for a future post, the other shoe to drop on this topic is the management of spam. A great tool in Akismet, coming soon!
Dave
Permalink Selection Improves SEO
Mar 22nd
Permalink Selection Improves SEO
There are many factors involved with getting more traffic to your blog. All the regular ones apply, of course like post often, use relevant terms in your post title, narrow your genre to a specific topic, and so on. In our fast-paced world, these alone can present considerable challenges, just taking the time to do them right. Each one of these requires us to make the right decisions for maximizing our effectiveness.
In this post, I’d like to provide a perspective on a decision you can make once – then enjoy the benefits every day. That decision is how you configure your blog’s Permalinks.
According to Wikipedia, a Permalink, or “Permanent Link” is “a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives.” This is important since links can become less stable over time as web sites evolve, merge and go away. Permalinks are mostly associated with blogs as a way to identify individual posts.
Since the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit uses WordPress as the blogging platform of choice, references to Permalink specifics will of course relate to WordPress. In WordPress, there are several ways you can format your Permalink, or the actual URL of your individual posts. They give you the following format options (Settings > Permalinks):
- Default http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/?p=123
- Day and Name http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/2009/03/22/sample-post/
- Month and Name http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/2009/03/sample-post/
- Numeric http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/archives/123
- Custom
Optionally, WordPress allows you to select Categories or Tags to preface the unique part of the Permalink.
You can see that based on your decision, your individual posts will take on considerably different formats. At last, the point of this post! Notice the differences between the default and the formats that include names. With the default, a sequential number is assigned, very efficiently, but not so SEO friendly. However, the formats with names also show the post date. That could be a bit more than us beginning bloggers want to show, just in case the day job gets in the way and we can’t post for a while. I’ve settled on an efficient, but SEO friendly format that doesn’t open the date kimono too far. Let’s look at a couple of other perspectives before I feel a draft.
First, a look at this from an efficiency perspective. In Geek Ramblings by Dougal Campbell, the point is made to not use text like Categories or Tags since there is a significant performance hit due to WordPress trying to distinguish between posts and pages. Significantly more information is stored to accommodate. The recommendation is to start the Permalink format with a number, like Date or the Post ID.
At The SEO Blogger, they are making a sound point about the importance of getting the post’s name in the Permalink structure. As I indicated earlier, carefully naming your blog post allows those keywords to be visible. Again, any time you can generate more SEO juice, the better. However, their suggestion about using Category as the initial identifier conflicts with Geek Ramblings.
Here’s my solution:
WordPress offers a Custom Structure, allowing you to design your own. I chose:
/%post_id%/%postname%/
In this format, the unique identification number assigned by WordPress starts the string, providing for increased efficiency of storing the posts. Then, the Post Name allows for the maximum SEO juice to be squeezed. In my opinion, the best combination.
While I still need to make good decisions each time I title a blog posting, this is one decision that is now made and will provide benefits far into the future.
Dave
Choosing a Domain Name
Feb 18th
Whew! This is one that could be a topic for an entire blog. Not to worry, I’ll start with a single post.
Choosing a domain name is as much art is as it is science. Considerations range from the emotional connection to a branding message that comes from a carefully concieved name to the search engine love that is generated by bots finding strong keywords in the URL. Your strategy is clear as mud.
The dot com in this post’s photo implies the value of the top level domain staple. However, there are differing views as to its true value. A staunch supporter is SEOmoz. To quote a part of their post, “With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that’s out there…” I agree with this sentiment – I can’t tell you how many times I have finished typing a URL with .com only to find out it was something else. Old habits die hard.
At the other end of the spectrum is BloggingTips.com. They run at it from a different direction. A quote from their site: ”If you have relevant content on your site that incorporates well-researched, popular keyword phrases as it relates to your niche, your blog/website will get good search engine ranking – no matter what its named, or what dot it ends in.” Again, I agree with this position.
Choosing which “dot this or dot that” you should use for your site’s top level domain is only a small part of the decisions involved with naming your site. In future posts, we’ll explore many of the other considerations for naming your baby. After all, we want it to grow up and be healthy and strong.
Dave
When is a comment SPAM?
Apr 4th
Posted by Dave in Uncategorized
5 comments
When is a comment SPAM?
Recently, I was exposed to an interesting dilemma. First, some background.
The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit has as one if its missions to help readers increase traffic to their own blogs. This is done through simple sharing of discoveries that work (or sometimes not) for me. The hope is that the average blogger will learn from and contribute to the ongoing discussion.
Since starting “The Kit” I have watched my visitor counts grow slowly, recognizing there is still a high bounce rate of people who found the site through search, but quickly realized it wasn’t what they needed. (That’s not necessarily bad news, since the search engines are actually seeing me!) Just in the last couple of weeks though, I have received the first comments to my posts.
Enter the dilemma.
The first post was from someone whose comment simply expounded on the merits of a certain water filtration system. I know we’re all trying to promote our own thing, but there wasn’t even an attempt to weave in a relevant comment to the post and then respectfully mention how that post’s topic might help his site and then provide a link. I’m all about sharing each other’s visibility, but I’m also not going to be SPAMed. Comment deleted.
Then there was the comment that came from someone promoting a weight loss product. This time, she (I know it’s she because she signed her name) submitted the following:
“Interesting blog, I just stumbled on it and I’m already a subscriber I recently went down 30 pounds in 30 days, and I want to discuss my weight loss success with as many people as possible. I wrote about my experience on my blog, and I welcome your suggestions!”
On the surface, this one at least made a kind remark about an “interesting blog” but still a nogo. I can buy the “stumble on it” part, but this is neither a subscription blog nor do I have any trackback links. My thinking is that this was a generic posting attempting to look like a thoughtful post. Nice try, but again, comment deleted.
My favorite was a comment touting the benefits of a certain group of females collected on a particular web site. Nuff said. Comment deleted.
But I must cite the first valid comment that has been approved on The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit. In the post, “Social Networking to Promote your Blog? But which one to use?” I received a very kind post from http://www.audiforsalebyowner.info/.
“Great site this http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com and I am really pleased to see you have what I am actually looking for here and this this post is exactly what I am interested in. I shall be pleased to become a regular visitor
“
First, I appreciate the kind words, but more importantly, this is a perfect example of many of the suggestions put forth here. (The least I can do since this person took the time to comment without SPAM, is to provide some Search Engine juice by posting a link back.) Take the time to create relationships – don’t just SPAM people. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know anything about this site and I am not providing an endorsement. I can’t because I don’t actually have anything more than a URL, but that is how relationships begin. This person took the effort and has gained a small amount of benefit from doing so.
My sincere hope is that this person will not only return to see what’s new, but share in the discussions so that we can all benefit from this new-found relationship. (A link back here as a valued resource wouldn’t hurt either.
”
Dave