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!
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 and all those who are trying to generate leads, about which you can discover more here. No website or businesses with websites can hope to thrive these days without the right implementation of SEO.
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 ) Mesa SEO Services and other experts employ strategies like keyword research, quality content creation, and user-friendly website design to improve both SEO rankings and user experience.
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!)
i wasn’t able to be in your session, so this was great to look over the recap. I have just been getting serious about my SEO…and the hardest thing to get rid of was the cutsie titles…I admit. Now I am working on going back and changing them (but yikes…it is so time consuming 🙂
I didn’t make it to the session either so this was great. Thanks for the helpful recap!
Jen – when I have a cutsey title I tend to put it in the back of the title more like a subheading. For example, this title is “SEO Tips for Bloggers” – a highly searchable and non-cutsey title. Then add the colon or dash and make your cutsier title “Merging Humanity With Technique” is NOT a phrase anyone would EVER type into Google search bars to find seo tips for their blog post. But I wanted to include it.
If you knowingly make these decisions than it is ok. As long as you realize that you might be sacrificing search engine traffic in order to keep your cute. Sometimes it’s worth it! 😀
Amy – I did love your recap post, truly. It’s been really interesting to me to see how so many people were coming to the conference w/different points-of-view. I love meeting new bloggers too. And how awesome that there are so many women of faith blogging! I LOVE that! I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk with you more at Blissdom but am glad to have found you and your blog. 🙂
Angela, can you elaborate on the follow/nofollow attribute. I’m interpreting your notes to mean that links to digg and wikipedia don’t count toward pagerank “credit”? Is that correct or do I misunderstand the concept?
Great recap. Thank you.
Lorie – Precisely! While you will still get direct traffic from digging an article, you won’t get the “page rank vote” from an incoming link, because the link doesn’t COUNT as an incoming link.
Whereas creating a hubpage hub, or using one of the follow link social bookmarking sites like Momshare.net (Kelby’s newest adventure) WILL count as an incoming link for your site.
It’s one of the reasons why I started creating hubpages to bring attention to my gardening articles instead of digging them. I only ever got a dozen or fewer hits from digging a S101 article, but on hubpages I not only get easily that much traffic, but I ALSO get the page rank vote, the incoming link, and the potential revenue from ad clicks or amazon affiliate sales.
Track your topics for awhile. Science articles tend to do better on Digg in my experience, and techie articles tend to do better. If you can get a dugg article near the front of the topic page you’ll get TONS of traffic and probably “make up for” the lack of incoming link. So, as with most things web writing, I recommend tracking your personal results for a month or two and trying multiple things. When I TRACKED my results, digg was barely worth the time.
Angela <><
Angela,
Are you talking about a “hug” article on your blog or a post on “Hub Pages.”
Kelby uses the term “Hub” to describe a round up post where she lists or links to several articles from a single “index” type piece. I ALSO use the Hub Pages website to create these types of round up posts. I usually call then “index” posts but it’s just semantics at that point. 🙂
Ooops, just realized I wrote “hug article” – aw… well it is Valentines Day tomorrow.
Thanks so much for this info. VERY interesting stuff! I’m loving it!
Thank you for the explanation and the tips, Angela. I was posting my articles on Digg (and Stumbleupon) when I first started writing but didn’t seem to see much return. So, I started focusing more attention on SM sites like facebook and twitter which generally don’t bring a ton of traffic in comparison to Google but do bring enough to make it worth my while. Plus, I enjoy the interaction on facebook and twitter more. Digg always seemed like “busy work” to me because I just didn’t really enjoy doing it. I didn’t realize that digg employed the nofollow rule though. That’s good to know.
I’ve started doing some roundup articles on my blog, but I might take a closer look at hubpages too and see if that might be a good fit for me. I like the idea of the incoming links and the increased pagerank credit.
Thanks again for the info. I’ve learned a ton from your blissdom recaps.
Love these tips as well as the other posts.. I’ve also not had much success with Digg but am now focusing on using Hubpages for linking to my UTH and Blog articles. Let’s see.. Plus, I really like the idea of using SEO plus personality for blog posts. Kind of a win-win situation.
Thanks for sharing the Bliss with us who couldn’t attend, Angela!
Many blessings:-)
i always build lots of hubpages informational website because i love to share info:*~
i like Hubpages compared to ezinearticles and buzzle, hubpages also rank well in search engines ,
The information is really helpful. The transcriptions came up very nicely. I really appreciate that especially the ABC’s of Web writing. It was too good. Thanks for sharing the article.