Tonight, we haveWorld Domination By Blog

David Rosam: Writing For SEO & Web Positioning Centre

I’m going to cover a lot of ground this evening

I don’t presume to teach you:

• The last word about:

• SEO

• Online strategy

• Copywriting

• Webmastering

I will give you a lot of pointers to help you towards world

domination by blog

Why are blogs so important in 2013?

Google

A particular view of Google

• Tries to make the Net a better quality place

• Tries to stop SEOs and Webmasters from cheating

• Tries to penalise junk sites

• Panda and Penguin updates

• Continuous algorithm tweaks

Used properly, your blog helps you keep Google happy

• Google has always liked lots of good quality content

• It lurves it now

Your blog is a brilliant delivery mechanism for great content

So we just write a load of good stuff and Google will love us?

Nope!

Welcome to the wilderness

You’re stumbling around

• How easily will you get to your destination without a map?

• Isn’t that just what you’re doing by creating content aimlessly?

Content isn’t King

• Content, alone, is an indulgence

• Content needs to be a team player

• It needs some support

If Content is a team player, Strategy is the coach

• Content needs a purpose

• Content needs a vision

• Content needs to work for you

• And, to work for you, it needs to work for your readers

But, enough of the Dodgy Analogies

What to you have to do to make your blog successful?

Start by asking a difficult question

What is your blog for?

I came up with these answers for Writing For SEO

• To attract new clients

• To act as a platform to develop and deliver products

• To share my expertise with more people (sorry if that sounds a bit yucky, but there it is)

Yours may be

• To attract more natural/organic search traffic

• To interact more closely with your customers and prospects, your community

• Supporting a local, hobby or sporting group - it doesn’t have to be to make a profit, or even work within a business context

• Another way of putting this is to define your niche. You shouldn’t try to be everything to everybody

Find out what your audience is searching on

• Google Key Word Tool (http://www.googlekeywordtool.com/) tells you a lot

• Key phrases you haven’t thought about

• How popular a key phrase is (how many searches are being made on it)

• There are loads of other tools out there, too - free and paid

What’s the competition?

• Not ‘Who’s the competition?’

• On the Web, I don’t care who my competitors are, I want to know what I need to do push them off the first page of Google

Take a look at the competition for the key phrases you need

• Try:

• Web SEO Analytics (www.webseoanalytics.com)

• SEOmoz (www.seomoz.org)

Put your key phrases into a spreadsheet

• Sort on search numbers

• Sort or filter on difficulty

• Filter on particular words

• Explore to see what themes there are for your content

Put a content strategy in place

• Theme key phrases for Pages on your blog

• Do the themes suggest Categories for your blog?

• Use the key phrases you’ve discovered to suggest blog posts

• You’re ensuring what you produce will appeal to people and presented in an easy-to-digest way

Use an EMD as a WMD

• Exact Match Domains

• A domain that reflects an important key phrase - like WritingForSEO.org

• A favourite tool for spammy affiliate sites

• Google said it was outlawing them

• But it hasn’t

Choose your EMD

• Find a high-traffic key phrase that applies to your site

• Search for available domains

• If you have a UK customer base, a .co.uk domain is a good thing

• So you’ll end up with agoodkeyphraseformyblog.co.uk

Choose a blog platform

• If you want a personal blog, choose Blogger or WordPress.com

• If you want to do business, make money or put a blog on an existing site, use your own WordPress install

• Flexibility

• Ownership of data

• Use your own domain (you can with Blogger, too)

Using a blog to help a site’s performance

• Don’t put the blog on a different domain - www.yourdomain.wordpress won’t help the site at www.yourdomain.com

• Don’t put your blog on a separate subdomain - Google treats blog.yourdomain.com as completely separate from www.yourdomain.com

• Do put your blog at www.yourdomain.com/blog/

With your strategy, domain and hosting in place, you can create

content

Writing your content

• Go for substance rather than frequency

• Post every day if you can, but don’t worry about it if you can’t

• Include at least one image, because it makes your post look less daunting

• Put together a schedule, and try to stick to it

• Monitor page popularity, social mentions and links

Give your content leverage

• Use your key phrases in headings, title tag and keyword tag

• Don’t go mad with key phrases

• Make sure you’re writing for your audience and Google in mind, not just Google

Build some links

• Social bookmarking sites:

• StumbleUpon

• Digg

• Reddit

• Guest blogging

• Forum and blog comments

Social media

• Don’t spend all your time on social media

• Content production is more important

• I suggest a presence on Twitter and Google+

• Plus either Facebook or LinkedIn

Measure your results

• You can find where you’ve got with Analytics - Google Analytics is free and very powerful

• Also install Google Webmaster Tools

• Link to Google Analytics

• Keep on measuring

Do all these things as best you can

• Online success is about doing as many things as possible well, rather than one or two perfectly

• Don’t cheat or automate

• Give your readers what they want

You can fill many of the gaps by looking on my website

www.writingforseo.org

David Rosam• Web www.writingforseo.org

• Twitter @writingforseo

• Google+ www.writingforseo.org/googleplus

• Telephone +44 (0)1273 906607

• E-mail david@writingforseo.org

• LinkedIn www.writingforseo/linkedin

• Facebook www.facebook.com/writingforseo

• Also www.webpositioningcentre.co.uk

• Please see Writing For SEO for image acknowledgements