Wondering if anybody might know of some good resources for bloggy SEO. I’m trying to expand my horizons and up that score. I’m not beginner, but by no means advances. Just looking for something straightforward, and not crazy in-depth.
I’ve done a fair amount of searching online, but everything seems to be rather disjointed. I’m hoping for personal experience here. Let me know what’s worked for you.
In fact, here’s a follow-up question: Do you even worry about SEO? I have a feeling most Type A (*ahem* me) personalities do.
UPDATE: I’m going to qualify this for people who don’t have control over the design of their blog. I am using a WordPress template and don’t have access to the CSS that makes it up, so changing of taglines and tags is pretty much out. Limiting, I know. But while we’re at it, I’m thinking of redesigning, so any suggestions there would be helpful too. Thanks!
April 22, 2008 at 9:50 am
I just write and naively hope that somebody might turn up one day to have a look at it. I know I should probably be a bit more proactive about the whole thing, but I struggle to understand why anyone would want to read my musings on the difficulties of being forced to say oh-regg-ann-o rather than orra-gar-no…even if they did appear a bit higher on Google…
Good luck with it anyway (I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to monitor your comments today for some tips for myself…!)
April 22, 2008 at 10:14 am
I’m experimenting at the moment. My blog is top in both google.com and .co.uk for the search term ‘pr blogger’ but nowhere for the term ‘pr blog’.
So I’ve recently changed my blog title to:
PRBLOGGER.COM - A PR blog
And the tagline to:
A PR blog by Stephen Davies covering public relations, PR blogging and social media
I’m now second in .co.uk for the search phrase ‘pr blog’ and moving up the ranks (still second page) for .com.
Here’s a blog post I wrote a while ago:
http://www.prblogger.com/2007/03/7-ways-to-improve-a-blogs-seo/
Novice type post but you might get something out of it.
April 22, 2008 at 10:17 am
thanks for the comment! for SEO, i find the SEOmoz guys (http://www.seomoz.org) ‘white board friday’ videos are generally pretty easy to understand and really helpful, some links for you -
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-creating-great-online-content
^^ very useful (not saying anything about your blog by the way!)
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ask-yourself-do-you-feel-lucky-about-getting-those-links-well-do-you-
^^ some quick and easy steps
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_digg_effect.php
^^ just search readwriteweb for seo stuff, loads on there, generally easy enough to digest
hope that helps, i think if you want people to read your blog you have to be concerned at least on some level about seo, but just dont go taking weeks off work to try and get a level 3 google pagerank or something equally ridiculous.
:)
April 22, 2008 at 10:30 am
Thanks for the tip, I’ll check out that site.
What’s funny is that I have a Page Rank of 4, but there are certain terms that I feel like I should be higher up on that I’m not. For example, my name: FPN used to be first when you Googled “melanie seasons,” but now it’s second (Facebook is first).I have no idea how that happened.
April 23, 2008 at 1:42 pm
SEO is a necessary evil. When I was the tech editor for a content network, I had to train writers on this front. I’ll also be releasing a series on SEO for PR pros in about two weeks at NakedPR, after consulting with some friends in the field, so keep an eye out for that.
Here’s the strategy that generally works (at least for me):
1. Focus your content on readers first; not search engines. Keyword-stuffed garbage can rise quickly, but Google often snuffs it out in time.
2. Never worry about it if you suddenly drop in rankings… especially in Google. There are a lot of natural fluctuations, and they usually work themselves out within a few weeks at most.
3. Your page titles are already looking optimized (post title before blog name).
4. You’re already tagging your posts - maybe more keyword-rich tags? Not sure what to tell you on that front.
5. Focus on the long-tail - the more specific the target keyword phrase, the easier it is to rank.
6. Keep your primary keyword phrase in your post title if possible, and at least in the opening paragraph - the higher up, the more “important” it is.
7. Let people build links for you. While Pagerank is great to gauge your overall links, they’re not counted in the same way for rankings as for your PR level. On your individual post pages, I don’t currently see a way for people to easily add your link to bookmarking services and the like (unless I just missed it). You can probably get a plugin for this. Personally I prefer using AddThis, because it gives people options (Stumbleupon, Digg, etc.) with just one button (less blog clutter).
That’s a starting point at least. :)
April 26, 2008 at 5:01 am
I have some plain English views on SEO ;)
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