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There is a common saying that search engines love blogs as they are always full of fresh content (updated frequently).

Undoubtedly this is a good point. Frequent updates also make search bots to revisit your blog frequently. But does it have any negative effect?

Yes there are some problems – the very nature of a blog makes it tough to optimize around specific keywords. Just think about the basic on-page optimization concept – keyword density. As your blog home page is updated regularly with new posts, it is tough to maintain keyword density.

And when you start publishing opinion posts, it is very tough to stick to a specific keyword group. More importantly, blog posts are fundamentally different from regular webpage content and people have different expectations from these two formats. And thus you cannot always be too accurate about keyword positioning or density.

Some people say that tags and categories make up for keyword density. But if you start publishing full posts in the home page, there are high chances that keywords in tags and categories will fall short to optimize the whole blog around specific keyword group (unless you are focusing on active link building).

If you say search engines love blogs because they are updated frequently, tell me one more thing – what does the word “update” mean?

If I am rewriting the content of a static webpage or making small changes now and then, doesn’t it mean that I am updating that page frequently? And at the same time, a static webpage gives me the opportunity to maintain healthy keyword density. Do not forget that in case of blogs, we are actually publishing different pages (posts) rather than updating a single page.

And why should I bother about the frequency of search engine crawling, if it does not help me to stay focused with specific keyword group.

What do you think?

Does regular update make it tough to optimize a blog around specific keyword group?

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Before I start writing the third post on how to get more organic visitors to your blog, here are the links to two previous posts (in case you missed them):

How to get organic traffic to your blog – Part 1
How to get more organic visitors to your blog – Part 2

Now, in the last post I was talking about the qualities of resource posts and how they can help you to get good position in search engine result pages and to gain more organic traffic.
But does it mean the opinion posts do not have any value? Well, it all depends on what you want to achieve from your blog.

The equation is simple – the Resource Posts bring you unique visitors from search engines and the Opinion Posts actually help you to establish the relationship with the new and existing visitors.

If you do not want to develop any relationship with the visitors, you can do well by writing resource posts alone. But, if you want to have a long term profit from your blog, try establishing a relationship with the visitors – create a niche network – in future they will promote your blog.

More importantly, these are the posts and comments that would eventually work as a catalyst to engage the new visitors with your blog to increase your reader base (do not forget that comments fetch more comment). And if you want to engage in social media marketing there is nothing better than opinion posts that make your readers to promote the resource posts. And who reads the opinion posts? If you take a closer look, you will find that most of them have some web presence (eg. A blogger) and it opens up more opportunity for incoming links.

If you read matt Cutts or Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki, you know what opnion posts are and how they can help you develop a niche. Do you agree?

What else does Opinion Posts do? These posts create a living and breathing brand out of you and your blog and brand sells like anything.

What are the differences between Opinion posts and resource posts?

To put it simply, resource posts are like regular news stories or articles (written in almost an impersonal format) that you see in different newspapers and opinion posts are editorials. Need some clarification?

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Popularity: 3% [?]

In my last post titled “How to get organic traffic to your blog!” I was discussing about two types of blog posts – resource posts and opinion posts. Now here is the next episode:
Resource posts are great ways to get some organic traffic if you treat it as an individual page of a regular website.

What do you do to optimize a webpage? Optimize the title around targeted keywords, publish unique meta data (for example you can use “all in one seo pack” to write specific Meta documents including optimized title tags if you are blogging on WordPress platform), optimize content around targeted keywords etc. As you are using a blog platform, you should also work on proper category selection (ideally the parent category should have targeted keywords) and tagging or labeling.

This is not all – the actual job starts now.

Take the initiative to get targeted links (Ok, call it link building) for those posts.
Why I am emphasizing on link building over natural links that you get from other bloggers?

In most of the situations, natural links are not very targeted unless you are very lucky. Though these links offer you great support, they do not often work well to improve your ranking in search engine result pages. Though search engines are growing smarter everyday to determine content relevance depending on the post material, still you need targeted link support.

Now, while writing the post you can also think about secondary keywords with less competition. The cumulative flow of visitors for different secondary keywords may offer you better return on time and resource investment than what you would have received from a single competitive keyword for the same effort. To add to this, it is much easier for a blog to rank well for secondary and long tail keywords rather than a competitive one.
If you have an running blog, spend some time on analytics report to find out which posts are getting organic traffic. Now re-optimize those posts around the keywords that are sending you organic traffic. If it does not improve the situation, try to get some targeted links depending on the overall worth of those keywords.

These simple tasks would definitely improve the number of your regular organic traffic. But does it mean that you should say goodbye to the second category – Opinion posts?
Stay tuned for the next post.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

In one of my posts (Did you optimize your blog around specific keywords?), I was talking about the importance of getting organic traffic. If you want a steady growth of your blog you simply cannot afford to ignore it. So, let’s try to understand different types of blog posts.

Broadly, we can divide blog posts into two categories – (1) reference material or resource post and (2) opinion posts.

For example, do a Google search for “wordpress plugin”. Which sites are ranking high? I know this is a very generic keyword but good ranking for such keywords can get you a lot of visitors. You would mostly see plugin directories in the search engine result pages for this keyword. Now try another search for “best wordpress plugins”. I know, this search term is also very generic but how many of those directories do you see in the list? This list is highly populated with blogs. Now try another search for “best wordpress seo plugins” – this should offer you some niche traffic though the keyword is a bit long. In this situation too, how many directories are ranking on top 10?

You may say that, as Wordpress is closely associated with blogging, blogs are ranking high. In that case, you can try the same experiment with keywords like iphone apps, best iphone apps etc.

Now, the blogs that rank high for keywords like best wordpress plugins or best wordpress seo plugins are actually reference materials or resource posts (category 1). They have a reference value and people actually search for these terms. Now if you are running a blog on WordPress, you can actually concentrate on such posts to get organic visitors. While writing posts under this category, try all the SEO tricks (best practices) you know and if necessary, work out to get as many links for these posts to rank high. These posts would actually supply you fresh visitors.

And now look at this very post. Rather than being a reference material, it would become an opinion post. The main reason is that, this post does not have any targeted keyword. And I didn’t accept you to visit this page via search engine for a competitive keyword on blogging. And this post is targeted to the existing visitors who would come back tomorrow to read the rest of the post…

To be continued:

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Popularity: 4% [?]

So you thought about starting a blog on your favorite topic that may eventually turn out to be your online business. You have good presence in different social medium and thus whenever you publish a post and introduce the link to your social network - you get a lot of visitors. Some visitors fall in love with your content and subscribe to your feed. And thus, with every post, you start growing your loyal reader base.Sometimes, as a seasoned marketer, you offer some bonuses (subscribe to xez feed and get ……) for the readers to grow your subscriber base in a short period so that you can earn some more money from advertisement.

This can be a good development process for your blog - but is it great enough to offer you the best ROI / post or time?

There is no doubt that, unless you start getting visitors from search engines, the ROI will not be as much as expected - at least close to the fullest potential of your blog. However, it is often very tough to rank top for competitive keywords unless you are investing time or money on link building.

Even though you get lots of natural links from different blogs in your niche, they are almost never targeted enough to give you desired ranking in search engine result pages for competitive keywords. However, blog posts are good to get visitors from keywords long tails that does not require huge link building efforts. But unless you start getting links for those targeted keywords, your ROI is sure to go down in respect to time and effort.

Another big problem is staying focused with content in regular blog posts. As number of pages start growing (along with each post), it is really tough to concentrate on single keyword for a specific page (as you would have got in a standard website). At the same time, if you target the home page for all the competitive keywords, things will always fall short of keyword density.

Did you think about these problems?

What do you do to overcome such problem?

Write your solution in the comment section or wait for the next post.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Do you think Amazon or EBay is your competitor just because you have started a new product-selling website and those products are sold in Amazon and EBay too?

Think twice, Amazon or EBay may be too big for you to fight (in respect to size, age and popularity).

Do you think About.com or Wikipedia is your competitor just because you are selling the same information?

Think twice, About.com or Wikipedia may be too big for you to fight (in respect to size, age and popularity).

However, if you are strategic enough, they do not have any chance to stand in the competition.

Reality check:

Situation - 1: You are fighting with big brands with huge authority like EBay, Amazon, About.com or Wikipedia

Wrong. You are actually competing with one or two pages of those websites. Though those one or two pages have trust value of such great domains, at the end of the day, they are actually single pages.

Situation - 2: They are the best sources of information.

Partially correct but (there is a BIG BUT) in most of the cases they are not well optimized. Moreover, there is nothing like “best source” - you can often offer better information package than Wikipedia if you concentrate more on specific information needs of your visitors. To add to this, many pages of Amazon and EBay are full of duplicate content (especially pages with seller-generated content). So, how they can be the best?

Situation - 3: Those domains are very old and got huge trust rank.

True but (there is a BIG BUT) if you outnumber them with inbound links, domain age would not be a problem. You may say that they have gathered thousands of links in many years and it would be very tough to outnumber them. True but do you really think all those links have targeted anchor text. Check out for yourself. You got good chances.

Situation - 4: People often visit those websites directly

Partially True but (there is a BIG BUT) most of the visitors for a competitive keywords use Google to find them the best page and if you can rank top for those keywords, you will not need to worry about visitor count.

Endnote: bigger sites have bigger problems and a niche mini site can easily outperform them by exploiting those holes.  All you need is a good and flexible strategy. Count on SEO - it is still the best.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

“If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better” - guess who is saying this!!

Don’t be astonished - Google has redesigned its stance on SEO (obviously the user centric SEO and the white hat one).

And this statement actually establishes the saying that SEOs actually help Google to understand a web site in a better way. We restructure the website and rewrite the content in such a way that Google can easily understand it. We stop Google to crawl certain pages that are not worth visiting. We clear out coding errors to provide a smoother path for the bot to run. And Google has acknowledged that we help Google to offer a better result to the visitors.

I agree that sometimes we overdo it - but a white hat SEO is always the best friend a website owner may have.

Anyways, in coming months we can see some interesting changes in SEO world and in online marketing strategy.

1. Webmasters used to publish duplicate content (or something they never wanted Google to read) in Flash files. Some even syndicated their website’s content via slideshows and other flash files. As Google has started crawling flash files - the amount of such syndications would definitely go down. And more importance would be given to video and image syndication.
2. Bloggers would be in huge demand for paid reviews over blogroll links. Market may be a bit down due to recent financial setback, but web should not bother about that much. If you want to expand online business, you must pay for advertisement (includes SEO too). Web acts differently than offline market - you need a continuous presence to do business online. And smart website owners would take the advantage.
3. In case of SEO, content designing and site navigation structure would get more importance.
4. On-page java scripts would become more popular even though Google bot cannot read them properly. Google’s extensive use of java scripts and java based applications in recent days would boost its popularity.

A suggestion: think simply and think from a user’s perspective - Google would kiss you Good Morning.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Let’s join hands and create a real network that would be beneficial for each of the members.

The idea is simple - let’s create a network of blogs (seo, web design, web development, internet marketing etc.).

What would happen here?

Each member would host a carnival every week where he or she would write a post on the carnival like SEO Carnival or Affiliate Marketing Carnival and would link to other blogs in the network that have written a good enough post on that specific topic.

The selection of posts would solely depend on the publisher of that post (this is important as he or she have their own responsibility to their readers).

On each carnival, he or she would declare the next carnival topic and date.

That’s it.

Who can participate?

1.    Blogs on SEO, web development, designing and related topics

2.    Blog’s weight - number of posts / PR / reader base or other criterions [would be decided by the participants - you - please write down your suggestions]

Why should you participate?

1.    You get fresh visitors to your blog from other blogs.

2.    You get great link love from other blogs.

3.    You get recognition in the blogosphere.

4.    You don’t pay anything for this.

[Here "you" stands for both the publisher of the carnival and the linked blogs.]

Rules:

There is only one rule: Be honest about your selection.

ROI:

Depends on you :)

Write a comment here with your views or mail me at roy.nbb [at] gmail.com.

Let’s make it happen.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Web is going local - webmasters are working hard to improve their search engine ranking around specific geographical location for better business. Especially, this is a big boon for local service providers like a lawyer or a local grocery shop. The recent hike in oil price has turned people to online shopping in bigger number :)

Here are ten tips on how to optimize your website to improve your local rankings in Google:

1. Book a country specific TLD. .com TLDs are good from user’s perspective but .fr is a better option for Google bot to understand your geo-location.
2. Host your domain in your own country. Google tracks IP location to determine the ranking of a website for local search.
3. Sign in to Google Webmaster Tool and set your preferred geo location [tools > overview > Set geographic target]. This would give a clear indication to Google Bot about what you actually want. This is more important if you are using .com or .org TLDs and want to target some other country but USA. However, I would still prefer a country specific TLD, if you are sure about targeting a specific geographical niche. But in that case, you might not get the opportunity of going global with your domain.
4. Submit your site to Google Local Business Center and also submit your site to other local directories like yelp (if you are from San Francisco). You should also look for local business listings, Google Base and others.
5. Publish your address in the contact page along with a Google map showing the exact location of your office or business center.
6. Promote your blog or site in your locality. If your local newspaper has an online publication, try to get a link from there.
7. Influence people to visit your website directly via Ads and other methods - if people from a distinct place visit a website directly in huge numbers, it would send a clear sign to search engine about the relevance.
8. Get links from websites with same TLDs. For example, if your TLD is .fr, get links from as many .fr sites as possible.
9. Use the name of your locality along with the main key phrase as anchor texts for incoming links. For example, if you are a Florida based SEO Company and if you want to optimize your website around Florida, use keywords like Florida SEO or SEO Florida. However, do not overdo it.
10. Optimize page content around your locality.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Popularity: 6% [?]

Do you think that SEO is into the same track too - like SEO 2.0?

Yes - advanced SEO had always been there - the SEO 2.0.

So, what does SEO 2.0 look like - goldfish in the wild or a zebra in an aquarium?

In traditional SEO, the main focus had been to improve search engine ranking for targeted keywords and getting as many visitors as possible. That’s it - traditional SEO stopped working there. And in traditional SEO, the main focus had been linking in and linking out and fixing keywords in the Meta Description and H1s.

But in SEO 2.0, the whole scenario is changing.

Now, the main focus is on visitors and their needs and overall experience in a website. It is about creating an environment and a platform for social communication. Webmasters are confident about one thing, if they can satisfy the visitors, search engines (read Google) would be bound to send them more traffic.  And thus, advanced SEOs are not writing title tag for search engines; they are just defining the page and writing the content to satisfy the visitors. Now SEO is visitor-centric.

And another most important aspect of SEO 2.0 is that people do not fully depend on search engines to get traffic. The concentration has shifted to traffic long tail. And the traffic long tail generated from social networks is getting more importance. However, there had been lots of debates on the issue whether those visitors are convertible into business or not. And it solely depends on the environment you provide in your website. Some people are successfully using them to increase sales and some people are just wasting their bandwidth.

Going local to be a global player! That’s the best part of SEO 2.0 where the webmasters focus on local visitors.

Being human from machine: “Who are you” is as important as the product you offer - communicate - convince - sell. Web is no more just an information source. Yu got to give it a human touch.

Some SEOs do that.

What else? Write a comment and get a link…

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Popularity: 8% [?]