Chapter 10
Getting Blogged Down
Blogging can help your SEO efforts in a few different ways. When you blog, you’re creating unique content that will help the search engines identify your site as an authoritative resource on your subject matter. And when you contribute to other blogs and forums, it can help you build up your link profile.
I highly recommend that you have your own blog. The two biggest players out there, the services that by far facilitate the most blogs for the biggest bloggers, are WordPress (www.wordpress.com) and Blogger (www.blogger.com). The good news is that both of these services provide options that are free or very inexpensive, and both are extremely easy to use. If you want a blog as part of your website, I strongly encourage you to go to WordPress or Blogger and set one up.
When you sign up with these services, you will be offered a free option hosted and supported by the service you choose or an inexpensive option that allows you to set up the blog on any domain that you want to use. If you are serious about getting into blogging, I highly recommend you set up the blog on your own domain. Once you start to amass traffic and an audience, it will be very difficult to flip a switch and transfer all that you have built to your own domain down the line. It is completely up to you, based on how much blogging you think you will actually do, but using your own domain name is definitely the preferred way to go if you plan on making blogging a significant component of your online presence.
Once your blog is set up and ready to go, you will need to create content for it. Update your blog at least once or twice a week. No need to overdo it, but you should definitely keep your blog active.
When it comes to blogging, the bottom line is that you’d better like to write—or work with someone who does. If you don’t have the time or ability to maintain a steady flow of blog content, try to make time. It can pay off substantially.
If you want to hire a company to help with this writing, you can always contract an outside vendor to help or use some of the same companies listed in Chapter 6:
• www.elance.com
• www.odesk.com
• www.iwriter.com
• www.99centarticles.com
• www.articleninjas.com
• www.articlesontap.com
• www.ccarticles.com
• www.myarticleexpress.com
As mentioned earlier, the quality of these article-writing services and vendors can vary greatly. Depending on your industry, this can make a big difference. If you work in a complex field such as finance or law, it would be advisable to write all of the content yourself. However, these writing services are typically very inexpensive, so you really won’t risk much by testing them out to see if they can write content that meets your standards.
One thing that can be said about these services—if they weren’t needed, they wouldn’t exist. There’s obviously a glaring demand for assistance with this type of writing, which is why so many of these services are able to survive.
If you find that none of the content produced can match your finely tuned professional abilities, then I encourage you to spend a few hours a week writing strong content for your own purposes. You’re going to need quite a bit of content to properly market your site, whether you post the material on your own site, contribute content as a guest blogger, distribute your postings across article sites, or use your writings to answer questions on forums. There’s quite a bit of thought and effort that goes into content creation, but the payoff can be huge.
It’s important to keep two things in mind when generating material. Don’t continually repost the same blog entry. The search engines pick up on these activities. Also, don’t create spammy articles, poorly written pieces with little value that overuse the intended keywords. If a reader would come away from your post with little to no value or added insight, then it probably shouldn’t be written.
Now that we’ve explored how to set up a blog and various options to create the content needed, let’s focus on how we can leverage these tools for our purposes.
First, use your material for internal linking. Within your own website’s blog, if an article mentions a topic or service that exists elsewhere on your site, make sure the article links to the page in question.
Next, constantly create new content; one to two new articles a week, optimally. Your posts don’t have to be incredibly long-winded, but they should center on topics specifically related to the search terms you are targeting. This is extremely important to keep in mind as you develop your content.
As mentioned in Chapter 6, link building is an instrumental part of article writing. Apply anchor text—wording that provides a link back to your site—for appropriate keywords to get a decent ranking.
As a reminder, anchor text is the visible characters and words that create a hyperlink display when linking to another document or location on the web. Search engines use this text to help determine the subject matter of the linked-to document.
This is such an important part of link building that I’d like to cover it again (even though it was mentioned in an earlier chapter). Here is the HTML code that would be used to properly insert an anchor text link:
