Went to SEO Forum Friday and someone said something about “double listings,” apparently. I missed it at the time, but thanks to the kinds notes of Elise (“Double listings are easier and can be fairly easily established by reciprocating links between your blog and a relevant pages on your site“) I saw the reference and looked it up.
Nick said to read Aaron Wall. What does Aaron Wall say about this? Nothing directly but the link back there is interesting just on double listings. As far as linking to your blog from your website? Andy Beard says this, but I’m not sure what it means.
Here’s another page about ways to get inbound links (the one about testimonials was interesting). In terms of linking from your blog to your website to get double listings, it doesn’t address that specifically, but Trent here says you can host a blog on your website as linkbait and to submit your blog to blog directories. Trent also says to do the blog to site link for a blog that’s hosted somewhere else, but to make sure this is a blog you update frequently. I think I’ll just ask a developer or two about this and get back to you in my next post.
This is part three of the Barn Notes traffic-building adventure, as inspired by this.
This is part two of what happened when I read this and made changes to Barn Notes to boost traffic.
8. About linking: I guess a link could take a reader away from your website. How do you make sure the links they click on will open another window so your blog stays on their screen? You can do that when you highlight the words you want to use as the link anchor, click on the link icon that appears, paste in your URL, then select “open in new window” under “Target.” It’s amazing how you can do something and not see your options until someone shows you what they are. Thanks, WordPress Forum!
9. Guest bloggers are good if they add value and will let you edit their donation before posting.
10. Don’t run ads until you’re established. Adsense and blog quality are inversely proportional in this guy’s opinion.
11. Make it easy to read with
- bullets
- blocks of text
- images
- graphs
- short posts
12. Remember to write about the pressing concerns of your target readers. For example, this blog is being built not just for my edification but also for those just getting started with blogs who don’t want to read a book or go to a seminar or struggle for months before they know what tracking software is for and how they can use it.
13. Tracking Software and how you can use it:
14. Once it’s out of your mouth: Now that readers can subscribe to your blog with RSS feeds, you have to be careful before you publish a post. If you are feeling passionate, let the post marinate a few hours before you put it out there. Anything you type in WordPress.com is saved a draft automatically. Just close the draft and go a way for a while. It will tell you there’s an Autosave version of your post and that you can restore it if you want. Do that, make any edits, and publish.
I read this and, as I did, I make changes to this blog to boost traffic. It was a great way to improve this nascent blog, one tactic at a time. I’ve divided it into three parts for manageability.
1. CMS (content management system): you can use wordpress, blogger, typepad or moveable type, but it’s even better to custom build your blog. You can go here to test drive free and open source software systems if you decide to go that route. My opinion? WordPress.org and self-hosting.
2. The best place to host your blog is on a sub-section or sub-page of your company website domain.
3. Title tag: write your title tags for the readers, but keep KW research in mind. Write first, optimize later.
4. Find your community and go visiting: I went to Technorati and looked for online marketing copywriters, for example. Interesting indeed.
5. Tag, you’re it. Went to Technorati and claimed this and another blog of mine. It was pretty easy. But what’s a ping? So I can ping Technorati and they’ll check my blog for updates, but I can’t automate this with WordPress.com. (Anther good reason to self-host and use WordPress.org.) Meanwhile, I set the ping page in my bookmarks and when I add new content that’s really amazing, I just go to this page and ping away. As the SEOmoz people say, don’t over-ping. Just do it when the content is worthwhile. You have to copy a piece of code into a post to get the Technorati connection, so to hide this post, you can backdate it. How? Just select “edit” by the “published on” date and change the date to a few weeks earlier. Thanks, WP forum, again!
6. Stay obscure. Got it. Turn off comments until I have something worth looking at and some kind of audience. (“Will I ever get that many subscribers or visitors?” I ask myself.)
7. This is about having something worthwhile to say. And this is what it looks like to say something valuable, something you’re the expert on, and get a good response for it.
Learning about optimizing a blog is a lot like learning how to do your taxes for the first time. It looks like it’s going to be replete with traps and opportunities for federal imprisonment until you remember that thousands of other people just like you are doing it. Then you fill in your last name, first name, exemptions, the number from this box there, the number from that box there, multiply by three, dah, dah, dah and before you know it you’re either getting some cash back or writing a check. Of course with blogs, it’s like the instructions could easily soak up most of the Pacific Ocean, but that’s okay. The ones who know most about optimizing blogs have probably been most successful at optimizing the sites where their good advice is posted. “Chances are, cuz I wear a silly grin the moment you come in to view …”
So there’s this about an SEO WordPress plugin, and this from Mr. Clay. And it’s back to learning more about what’sablog, howtoblog, whytoblog, optimizeablog, etc.
The plugin, though I couldn’t use it here at my dotcom site, points to what you need most for WordPress SEO (this too):
- Titles -
- Descriptions
- Keywords
- Duplicate content
Looks like you don’t have much customizing possible with the .com version. What you get is sidebar widgets, RSS syndication, you can have multiple authors, a community based forum and you can have as many of these types of blogs as you want with just one account.
With WordPress.org, you get much more, can manipulate permalinks (lots of info out there I’m finding for doing this and more than one way to skin this cat), can download and install mega amounts of software for free, have access to core code and many WordPress themes.
To use WordPress.org, you have to get yourself some Web hosting (space) and you have make sure that the server you choose has the required software.
Hosting compatibility is easy to check too.
Here’s what you need to do after you have hosting. It certainly doesn’t look simple. To a techish person, I guess it’s probably pretty straightforward. But I would like to learn how to do it.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue working on this blog, SEO lame though it may be, and get ready for the big .org debut as soon as I can get that done.
Can I have pretty permalinks? (These are the links to my blog from my
- blog post title
- Comments link below the post
- Permalink link that appears below the post
- titles of posts that appear in the Recent Posts sidebar.)
“You cannot change permalinks at wordpress.COM. This is a multi-user version of wordpress and there are limits to what can and cannot be changed since we all share the same underlying files. A change to any of those files would change things for everyone, not just the person making the change.”
The good news is WordPress.com lets me edit my permalinks!!!
I am going to go look at my W for D book and get back to you in a sec with something new about blogging. Meanwhile, you can watch listen to this.
Question:
Can you use plugins if you aren’t self-hosting a blog using wordpress.org but are instead a lowly wordpress.com blogger?
No. Plugins can only be used if you are using the self-hosted version.
Should I get a self-hosted version for best SEO? Possibly. Another topic for another day.
Digging into setting up a blog in the first place, I started with my personal blog, learned to add links to the text (highlight link-destined words, click the handy link symbol, plug in URL) messed around with finding a new image for the header (cropping the image is required so it fits, and I learned quickly that you can crop anything and usually it’s cooler), and went into settings and added a few meek widgets (these to investigate later). Then, I blogged a few times, added links to the side bar and had some fun.
I can see how this sort of navel gazing can suck up some major free time. Finally I launched this, the barnnotes blog you see here. The barn image I downloaded from a random search (it’s a barn near my birthplace of Fort Wayne, IN), and the text I was able to easily play with, at least colorwise, by just sliding a little tool around in a box. Ah, if all of life were that easy.
More to come as I dig further and set up the foundation of this blog about seo blogging, straight from the barn and aimed at no one in particular, since I have a nagging feeling that I’m writing about learning to ride a bicycle and reporting my findings to a bunch of NASCAR drivers.
