Archive for November, 2009
Your domain is your home…
Monday, November 30th, 2009
When we talk about search engine optimization (SEO) we are talking about your domain name. You can think about your domain name as your home, the home of your business. It is where you and all of your employees work hard to represent your business well, and offer stellar services to your clients. You choose your employees for their skills and positive qualities, and know that they contribute to the growth of your business. So you wouldn’t want to miss out on all of that positive promotion, right?
Think about the different elements of your website each as an employee, working hard to boost your rankings in the search engines. As you have read in previous articles, your blog can be seen as your Employee of the Year. Your blog (if you are using it well) is constantly being updated with content relevant to your business, and feeding the search engines with reasons to “pick you” when an appropriate keyword comes up. So, why wouldn’t you want your blog in-your-home, rooting for your team?
Many people don’t even realize it, but if your blog does not sit on your domain name, it is not helping your search engine rankings. Check the domain name of your blog. Does it end in wordpress.com, typepad.com, blogspot.com or something of the sort? If so, your blog isn’t in your home. I am sure it would be much happier to be a member of your team, living in the spare bedroom, or even above the garage. As long as it is in your home! So, check right away to see where your blog is living, and if it is not on your own domain name, fix that asap!
Feel free to contact me if you have questions about this.
Tags: domain name, rankings
Posted in Blogging, SEO | No Comments »
How does my blog help my SEO?
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
In a previous article entitled “Get me to the top, please” I touched on the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). One of the leading ways to improve your SEO is to have a blog…but more specifically…write blog articles. It doesn’t just help you to have a blog in your possession, attached to your website, you actually need to use it.
Every article that you write on your blog offers you an opportunity to tell search engines “Keep checking back, I am adding more all the time”. Search engines visit your site depending on the frequency that you actually add information. So if you had your 10 page website designed in 2005 and you haven’t edited or added new pages to it since, it is pretty likely that search engines don’t visit it much. Not very exciting for the search engine, huh?
If you start out with a 10 page website and then add 4 articles to your blog per month, you are also making it that much more likely that you will be found in search engines. Over a year you will accumulate to 58 pages, over 5 times the amount of chances that Google will choose you when someone searches for a keyword associated with your business.
And to get to the nitty-gritty details…what you write about is really important too! If your business is web design, but your blog articles are about daisies, you are not helping your cause too much. The search engines will read every word in each article to determine when you match a search engine query. So if you are writing about how to grow daisies, it is unlikely that a search engine will list you in the results of a search on web design.
So if you want to improve your rankings (SEO):
Start a blog
Commit to writing a few articles a month to start
Write about topics related to your business
These are the first steps. From there, have fun with it! Write in a manner that engages, entertains, and informs. If people enjoy reading your blog they will also want to subscribe to it, suggest it to others, link to it, and eventually you will be drawing in new clients too!
Posted in Blogging, SEO | No Comments »
RSS – How to Subscribe to a Blog
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
Image courtesy of Smashing Magazine
Have you seen this image before? The ubiquitous circle with two arcs? You have probably seen it on tons of website, and if you have no idea what it means, you are not alone. Many of my clients are not aware of how this little icon can help simplify their lives.
It comes in all different colors, but it is there to tell you one simple message: “subscribe here”.
There are so many blogs on the internet these days – you can learn about anything and everything. Whether you want to stay up-to-date on your niece’s travels through Europe, or the latest cell phone innovations, RSS will bring the articles to you. This way you don’t have to check each individual blog to see if there is anything new…you can just subscribe using the RSS link, and voila! the updates are delivered to you.
But…how does it get to you? Well the next step is to have a “feed reader” which will gather the subscriptions for you. There are tons to choose from! Personally I am very happy with the one that I use: Newsfire, but if your computer does not meet the requirements for Newsfire, you can also check out this list of other options.
Do you already have a feed reader of choice? Let me know what you use by leaving a comment below.
- An example of a browser which provides an RSS button for subscriptions.
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »