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Aug
05

Link Building Tactics – Increase Your Traffic Through Organic SEO

By | SEO Tips

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building incoming links for traffic

Are you building incoming links to your site wisely? Let them all point to a well-anchored post or page!

This post was written as part of the Blog Hop Conference at Home and you can check out the other 2 dozen + conference sessions being offered at Blog Conference Newbie’s Blop Hop Conference Agenda!

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a way to help search engines figure out what you’re writing about. I’ve written about the basics of SEO for Bloggers in the past, and have even discussed the importance of building incoming links. However, I wanted to share some more in-depth information since Google’s Panda changes and since I had the occasion to test the link-building principles in a recent case study after the launch of my new ebook.

Case Study of the Ebook Links

Before the book launched, I wrote a post about Why You Should Write an Ebook. If you search the phrase “Why You Should Write an Ebook” I rank second in Google results (right behind Seth Godin-  Not bad!). However there was another keyword phrase that would have fit the post just as much – Benefits of Writing an Ebook.

I decided to focus on that second phrase when linking to the post from elsewhere around the web. I knew I had many guest posts coming up to celebrate the launch of my ebook, and I chose to link back to this Why You Should Write an Ebook post from many of them using the phrase “benefits of writing an ebook”.

Notice in this guest post at About.com about the steps of writing an ebook (different but similar topic focus), and here in this post about planning your posts with an ebook in mind, and this post about turning passion into profit through ebooks, or this one about getting started with ebook topic selection.

And with those incoming links alone, when you search “Benefits of Writing an Ebook” on Google my angengland.com Why You Should Write an Ebook post ranks #3. #3! For a term not even in the title or introduction. The term wasn’t added to the subheading until I decided to target this keyword phrase.

Incoming Links Have SEO and Traffic Power

Readers are looking for you. Are they finding you?

Can those four incoming links really impact the traffic of my site? Absolutely! That post is currently in my top ten of posts on my website with about 1/2 the traffic coming from search engine traffic and the other half coming from direct traffic (with guest posts expect a temporary increase in direct traffic that tapers off as those posts drop off the front page of the other website). So those four incoming links helped boost the importance of that post to Google.

Think of it this way – the 1/2 of the visitors that came directly from those websites were going to come no matter what type of link I used. They were visiting my site because they read the post and wanted to check out what I’d linked. However, the 50% of visitors that came from judicious keywording? Those were EXTRA! Those are the bonus visitors who found me because I implemented smart link building tactics with my guest posts. In a very real sense, I DOUBLED the traffic to those posts with my keyword selection in the first month. Wouldn’t doubling your traffic help you out? Is it worth one day of keyword research time?

When someone searches “benefits of writing an ebook” my post ranks highly for the term. Why? Because these other authority sites have TOLD Google that’s what my post is about. It’s the same reason why the top result for “click here” in Google is Adobe. Because every website with a PDF download says “To download the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, Click Here” and links to Adobe’s website. They’ve all, in a sense, told Google that “click here” is what that website is about.

How Can You Use This Tendency To Boost Traffic?

keywords that welcome readers in

The right keywords welcome the right readers to your site.

Well if you really want to get fancy with it, you can target keyword phrases with higher search volumes. In otherwords, when you write a guest post or column somewhere, instead of linking haphazardly, you can link with a plan. Link with just a teeny, tiny bit of fore-thought and change the name of the game for yourself. Change how Google thinks of your blog. Or even a specific post!

Even just picking one main keyword phrase or focus per post – or choosing one post that you want to focus on highlighting when you’re guest blogging or writing as a columnist somewhere or contributing to a content site around the web, can make a huge difference in the results you have building your search engine traffic and rankings organically. You should consider doing keyword research, even just once, to find a handful of core key phrases to focus on in your search engine optimization efforts.

I’m talking about doing the research work ONE TIME (or hiring someone like me to do it for you) and then using that information any time you write anywhere else online. One time work. Long-term benefits.

Where Can You Get Incoming Links

For me it’s simple – the easiest way to control the quality and nature of the incoming link you have pointing back to your website is to create content for other sites. I’m a writer – that’s my default mindset. By creating a few extra tidbits of information, the way I did with the ebook guest posts, you can lead readers yes, but more importantly Google, back to your main website.

So where can you write to get those links? Guest posting is one way to build the incoming links. What websites have a similar or related topic that you could write a guest post for? I’ve collected a full list of websites to write at for incoming links that you can look through and select from. Contributing to any or all of these sites can be part of an important traffic building campaign.

Your contributions will not only bring you potential new readers, new followers and all the other benefits of direct traffic, but also help you create a highly effective search engine optimization strategy that works organically without feeling spammy or icky or using any black-hat techniques that Google is getting better at rooting out. However, those guest posts and contributions will ONLY work as part of a long-term traffic building plan if you HAVE a long-term traffic building plan.

Nov
30

SEO Basics for Blogging – Writing for Google Traffic Without Losing Readers

By | Personal Blogging, SEO Tips

10 Comments

This post is written as part of The Blogging Mavens blog series which you can see the rest of at A Closet Writer.

There is a delicate balance between using basic SEO principles to bring in the search engine traffic you should be seeing on your site, and “writing what you want to write”. Many bloggers are under the misguided opinion that being aware of SEO will be selling out from their writing and their audience. I disagree – knowing how SEO works will enable bloggers to FIND their audience. Or rather, to help their audience find them!

The ABC’s of Good SEO Writing

When I’m talking about search engine optimization, especially with beginning bloggers or those who are just learning about SEO, I like to talk about the ABC’s.

A = Active Titles: Call the post what it is. Titles are one of the key elements on the page that Google checks when determining what the post is about. If your post is about making homemade pizza, call the post “Making Homemade Pizza” and you’ll bring in the right readers.

B = Bolded Subheadings: Use subheadings like mini-titles to describe each paragraph or two so Google, and your readers, know what you’re talking about. That way Google can send you the readers that want to hear what you have to say.

C = Cut Away Fluff: With very few exceptions, it’s better to write multiple, shorter posts, than it is to write one gigantic post. Don’t cram the homemade pizza, the delicious dessert and the family fun night game into one 1500 word post. Make them three 400-500 word posts and give your readers more opportunity to find you.

Moving beyond the ABC’s of good SEO there are a few other tips to keep in mind.

Additional Ways to Increase SEO on Your Blog Posts

Here are a few other ways to improve the SEO on your blog posts and articles. While I go in-depth into each during my talks at conferences, I want to just highlight them here for you. If you have questions, let me know.

  • Name your photos with a strong keyword phrase.
  • Use image alt text and/or captions to improve your post’s SEO.
  • Interlink relevant posts from within your website.
  • Crosslink to relevant content on other sites (your own as well if you write in more than one place).
  • Register your own domain name.
  • Get rid of your clunky themes (sites that load too slowly are penalized by search engines).
  • Use clear categories and tags instead of cutesy and obscure.
  • Build incoming links to your blog. Consider linking to specific posts in addition to your main website.
  • Write, write, write. Fresh content gives you more chances to be found.

So when you’ve moved beyond the very basics of search engine optimization keep some of these other tips in mind. Use your keyword phrases wisely and remember that you can still choose to write about whatever topic you want to write about. By formatting the post with a few of these SEO tips in mind, you’ll bring in additional readers from search engine traffic you may have otherwise missed.

Sep
17

Interlinking and Crosslinking for SEO to Increase Rankings

By | How tos, SEO Tips

9 Comments

This is a training I recorded for Blissfully Domestic and Untrained Housewife but I hope that many of you are able to benefit. Interlinking and cross-linking (what I call linking across multiple websites) can hugely benefit bloggers and web writers and I’ve given a few examples in my screencast below that you may find helpful.

Writing for multiple websites can be a challenge but there are benefits. When Google May-Day hit I found that Untrained Housewife traffic did not suffer at all, in fact increased slightly, while other websites were shaken up.

In researching some possibilities with a few good friends who are STARS with the SEO stuff, we concluded that linking in from multiple websites really matters more than ever. And interlinking to specific posts – not just main homepages. How does it work? Here I demonstrate two main ways to interlink around the web.

YouTube Preview Image

Sites and Resources Mentioned:

Feb
11

SEO Tips For Bloggers – Merging Humanity With Technique Blissdom Workshop Recap

By | Conferences, SEO Tips

18 Comments

This is the teaching outline and merged notes from the Blissdom Wisdom Workshop on SEO and Stats that was taught by Kelby Carr (@typeamom) and myself, Angela England (@AngEngland). Thanks to @econemicliving who shared her copy of the notes – the basic teaching outline was created ahead of time, but the Q & A’s came from the audience and helped guide the session outcome!

Writing Good SEO Does Not Have to Hide Your Humanity. Photo by Ivan Petrov

Writing Good SEO Does Not Have to Hide Your Humanity. Photo by Ivan Petrov

Kelby -Understanding SEO for Bloggers

SEO does not have to mean geeky/soulless. You do not have to choose between writing for humans and computers.

Reasons SEO is important to bloggers

Look at SEO as a different style of writing, just like newspapers, books, TV, radio, etc. are all media with their own styles. Cover basic standards for web/SEO writing: clear, concise, on point, etc.

Ask Yourself: “What Would I Search?”
Go to Google and do a search before you start writing – what comes up is probably what your title should be. (What is this about?)
-Slight tweaking of a phrase can make a big difference

Researching and choosing your keyword phrase (with demo of doing keyword research)
-Ex: mommy blogger, mom blogger: MOM BLOG, top 10 mom blog
(Google – keyword tool –click on global monthly search volume (keep use synonyms checked) – be sure people are searching it.

(Angela’s Note - one of the best features of my ebook is the step-by-step visual guidance on how to do this. If you are “stuck” on this portion of keyword research, or still having trouble applying it to your specific situation, that may be a resource for you to consider.)

Angela – Implementing Human-Friendly SEO on Your Blog

Understand the ABC’s of Web Writing

  • A – Active Title “No Cutsey” – Start with a good, clear title (should ALSO be title tag next to Mozilla/IE symbol)

  • B – Bolded Subheading – Use Heading (Angela uses H3) setting vs just bolding

-Subheading for clarity, helps catch the eye
-work some of the words in your title into your subheading

  • C – Cut Away Rambling Fluff (narrow focus)

Things that help with SEO also help with human readers -(Sub heads – bullets – scan )

Don’t be Afraid to Tailor SEO to Site  and Situation - (demo of posting book review  to three diff sites)

SEO in Action – Formatting the Post

Tag your photos too – people search for photos- google image search – use hypens between your words – alternative text to increase SEO. Do intro paragraphs for videos and then embed it

From Kelby -Categories = chapters and Tags = index

Takeaway Handout – post from my blog/ebook w/article template for web writing

HUB PAGE – a post to send people to other posts – put your links in a keyword sentence

(Angela’s Note – By popular request, here are some sample hubpages. This is the round-up post for the Ten Habits of Successful Blogging Series on my site. This shows Popular Children’s Books for Preschoolers and here’s one Kelby did about Traveling in the Summer. )

How Can You Improve SEO Now?

  • At the end of post – call to action (what do you think, post a comment, read this) Link to other people
  • Weave your keywords/title throughout your post – words in title should be in first paragraph
  • Google pagerank, firefox browser extensions, seaquake, pagerank
  • Optimize your past posts – will re-index your SEO’s, including your page titles – rework old content
  • When you repeat posts (Freebie Friday) put more interesting title at beginning (CVS freebie – Freebie Friday)

A Word About Stats and Analytics

  • Install Google Analytics – look at referral from google (if under 50%, there’s a problem)
  • Get Clicky – to see what people are clicking on when they leave your site
  • Take advantage of seasonal content
  • Social Bookmarking (wikipedia and digg = no follow links)
  • Curtsey, mom share, propeller, facebook fan page, stumbleupon.com, Hubpages website are follows (This sample from Hubpages includes another example of a round-up page designed to get On-Topic links back to other posts and articles).
  • Google.com/webmasters

-set preferred domain
-Claim a sitemap (please use rss feed as a sitemap) – not ideal, but a place to start

Angela says: Content attracts, relationships keep

Search WP extension: “redirect” if you’re going to start changing page names

Create HUB PAGE with lots of resources – with links – and put in side bar

People love Top 10 Lists

(Angela’s Notes – I couldn’t take exact transcriptions on this session because my mouth was open the whole time so I hope you’ll all forgive the rather abrupt and “bullet pointed” type of notes. The information is, of course, still helpful I hope. :-) Kelby and I bounced off eachother so much through the session it was hard to note who said what sometimes. For Mommy Bloggers SEO Advice, please check out Kelby’s upcoming book which will have more specifics on SEO tips that WON’T make you sound like a robot!)

May
23

Five Essential Elements of Good SEO

By | SEO Tips

10 Comments

There are five main components of SEO that a writer must keep in mind when writing for the web. Or rather, when writing any blog post, website article or copy that will be placed anywhere on the web – even though it is written for a human being to read. The truth is, if a writer does not have basic SEO techniques no one will find their blog post or article.

SEO Tip #1 Clear and Relevant Titles

If you ignore everything else in this post, please do not ignore this. You must have a clear and concise title. Otherwise it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, no one will ever find your website except, perhaps, a handful of your close friends.

For example, I could have titled this blog post “Be Like the Pied Piper” – a clever twist of words referencing drawing a large amount of followers to your blog or website. However, if I were going to type in a search term into Google to find the information in this blog post, I would search “Good SEO Essentials”.  Therefore, those are the words that should be in my title. Google does not have much as a sense of humor, unfortunately.

See Kelby Carr’s (@TypeAMom) article for more details about SEO savvy titles.

SEO Tip #2 Introduce Your Topic Specifically

Unfortunately, most of today’s readers want to know what you are going to talk about and they want to know NOW. They will not spend two minutes (or two paragraphs) trying to figure out what your post is really about. They want to know whether it is going to tell them what they want to know. Soon. The first paragraph of your blog post should introduce your topic (and probably look very similar to your title) immediately. Be cute and witty later. After you’ve hooked your readers.

SEO Tip #3 – Focus The Topic of Each Post or Article

As @HeatherSolos pointed out at a Twitter Site-Warming Party, keeping a narrow, clear focus on each specific blog post will naturally produce strong keywords. There is a huge difference between writing about “Labor Pain” and writing about “Benefits of Massage During Labor” and “How to Use Massage During Labor“. Notice, those are two seperate articles. You can see how the keywords and keyword phrases fall naturally into place, because I have kept the focus of the article very specific.

SEO Tip #4 Use Subheadings To Increase SEO

As demonstrated in this blog post, subheadings are highly useful. They keep you tightly focus on your post topic because you can quickly tell by the subheading if you are veering off course. For example, if the subheading for this paragraph had said “Adding Affiliate Links to Your Blog”, but my title is about five basic SEO tips, than it is obvious I am moving off to a different topic.

Subheadings also break up the blog post, allowing readers to more easily skim your post and read online. If a block of text is too long, readers will give up before finishing your post. Subheadings also allow you to restate your keywords again. In the blog post I thought about using “Five SEO Tips” as the title, but instead chose to use that in my subheadings.

SEO Tip #5 Use Keywords Naturally

No one wants to sound like they are a robot spitting out keywords to serve Google Adsense. There are plenty of those types of websites out there for sure! But good, human-driven, high-quality content does not have to ignore search engine optimization – rather integrate it organically throughout the blog post or web article.

For example, in the Labor Massage article I mentioned above, the introduction could have said, “How my husband helped me while I was having my baby.” While that is certainly a valid introduction, you can see how this introduction, “Using massage to comfort a mother during her labor has been proven to help in many ways. See the benefits of touch for a birthing woman.” places several of the keywords and keyword phrases right at the top when readers are trying to figure out what the article references.

Remember to use good SEO techniques, even if they are just these five basics, when writing your blog posts and articles so you will be found by the readers you want to attract. Someone out there is looking for what you have to say – will they find you?

Additional Articles:

Why is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Important?

SEO Tips for Bloggers – Notes from a Conference Session I Taught

Apr
08

Why is SEO or Search Engine Optimization Important for Website and Online Writing Success?

By | SEO Tips

2 Comments

SEO tips and secrets! Learn successful SEO is 30 days or less! 100 Keywords Guaranteed to Make You Money!

The buzzwords and phrases are prolific and, frankly, can be overwhelming for new website owners or writers trying to make a living online. Why is Search Engine Optimization important? What is all the keyword hype about and why should you pay attention? Lets look at the top five reasons for learning, and using, good keyword SEO techniques.

Keywords tell your audience what your content is about.

Remember that online viewers have a short attention span. If they cannot figure out what you are talking about, what they will learn, and why they even want to bother in the first paragraph or two, they will quickly click to a new website.

Accurate Keywords Help Increase Revenue Through Proper Ad Alignment

Sometimes as a publisher, you are targeting a specific high-paying keyword phrase in hopes of increasing your overall revenue. In order to increase the likelihood of attracting the desired ads, you will need to make sure you are using the proper keywords. This doesn’t happen by accident, but rather through effective keyword research.

Search Engine Optimization Increases Your Readership

If your readers can’t find you, they won’t be reading your web content. Drawing in a larger number of readers can only happen if you are writing in such a way that your customers or readers can find you. And of course, the more people who visit your website or blog, the greater your chances are to make money.

Search Engines Will Rank Your Content Better With Good SEO Techniques

Since most people find blogs, websites or articles through search engines like Yahoo, Google or others, publishers need to make sure they are writing content that can be found. The proper use of titles, subtitles and clear focus on each page, are essential for helping search engines find and rank your content quickly and properly.

Using A Strong Keyword Strategy Helps Readers and Writers

As a web writer, having a strong keyword research strategy in place can help you narrow your focus. You don’t wonder “What am I going to write about next?” because you have your keyword phrases researched already. Your readers are able to read high quality, well-focused content, while you are able to write your content easily in a way that will be not only discovered, but appreciated.

Additional Resources: Website Optimization by Andrew King