4 Basic SEO Blogging Tips to Generate Visibility and Website Traffic

by Karen Cioffi

SEO stands for "search engine optimization." It’s the marketing strategy that allows the search engines, such as Google, to find your website and its content. Being aware of these strategies is essential to having the search engines not only find your site, but to also categorize and index your content. This is how your content is made available to online searchers.

This strategy is part of inbound marketing. It’s using content, in this case your blog posts, to attract people and businesses to what you’re offering.

Below are four of the fundamental SEO blogging tips to get you going in the right direction.

1. Use keywords.

A keyword, according to Techopedia.com, “is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a Web page.” They help search engines, like Google, match a page (your blog post) to a relevant search query.

Use your keyword in your article title and within the first paragraph of your post.

You can add it a couple of more times throughout the post, just don’t overdo it. Search engines frown upon keyword stuffing.

Try a keyword search tool to find an effective keyword. One that offers 30 free keyword searches is http://www.wordstream.com/keywords.

Another option is to input a ‘word or phrase’ that’s relevant to your blog post topic into Amazon’s search box. See what keywords suggestions Amazon offers in its dropdown box.

2. Opt for long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are words that will move you away from highly competitive keywords.

As an example, a highly competitive keyword is  "health." In a recent Google search, the keyword "health" came in at 3,500,000,000 (3.5 billion) results. That’s a whole lot of competition. This means 3.5 billion bloggers are using the keyword ‘health.’

Long-tail keywords narrow the playing field. The keyword "multiple sclerosis and weather," came in at 972,000 (under 1 million). That’s a HUGE difference.

3. Write for your reader.

More important than keywords, your article needs to be an informative, engaging, and understandable.

Today’s effective marketer needs to create shareable content. Your readers need to feel motivated to ‘share’ the post with others.

4. Work the social networks.

Share your blog post links to Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. You should also inform your groups. Get the word out. And, be sure to have a SHARE button so visitors can share the post also.

I hope these four SEO tips help you get your visibility and website traffic soaring.

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Karen Cioffi is a former accountant who is now a multi-award-winning author, ghostwriter, freelance writer, editor, and author-writer online platform marketing instructor. She founded and manages Writers on the Move (a marketing group), and presents online writing and marketing workshops and webinars.

Karen has published 12 writing and marketing eBooks, the most recent, Article Marketing: Increase Website Traffic with Properly Formatted and Search Engine Optimized Content.

In addition to this, Karen’s website, Karen Cioffi Writing and Marketing, was named Writer’s Digest Website of the Week, June 25, 2012.

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Join Karen Cioffi's upcoming online class,

Become an SEO Writer in Just 4 Weeks.

Visit our classroom page  for details and enrollment.

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1 comment Karen Cioffi, keywords, online class, SEO for blogs, SEO tips, traffic to your blog, traffic to your website, WOW class, WOW instructor

The Power and SEO Behind Blog Commenting

A while back, Margo Dill wrote a great blog post, Comment Sense: Using Comments to Build Your Blog Readership, which brought a lot of Muffin readers out of their shells. Today, we bring you a post by the ladies at Author Marketing Experts that shares even more reasons why you should comment on other bloggers' posts, as well as a blog commenting and SEO plan for taking action. Did you know commenting was good for SEO? Find out why!
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For the past five or so years, we've organized teams to support an author's efforts to increase the SEO of his or her website. We've done this a number of ways, but the biggest and most powerful was--and is--blog commenting.

When we first launched teams to offer blog commenting, most people didn't have a clue how powerful this type of marketing was. Most Internet people did and have been doing it ever since. Now it's become more mainstream, and everyone seems to want to jump on the blog commenting bandwagon. But let me caution you, because there's a right way and a very wrong way to do this. I'll explain both.

Creating a Blog Commenting Plan

The first step in blog commenting is creating a plan and, of course, knowing who you'll be engaging with. Here are a few ways you can get started:

Deciding who to follow: Who will become part of your online networking tribe? These are the people influential to your industry. They might be competitors to you, or spokespeople. They might also be authorities in one way or another. Whoever they are and whatever they offer, it should somehow dial into what you are promoting. I recommend that you make a list of the top 5-10 names. Don't go overboard for now. I'm sure there are more people you could engage with, but to start, I want you to focus just on a few. You can grow the rest of your list from there.

Once you have your list, you'll want to start following their blogs and also find out where they are appearing. This might mean commenting off of their website; I'll explain in a minute why that's important. First, let's look at how you can organize this information:

RSS feeds: This is the quickest and simplest way to get started. Subscribe to their RSS feeds and keep all of these in your online reader, or Google iPage. That way you can spend a few minutes in the morning going through your blog posts to see which ones you want to comment on.

Twitter: This is another great way  to find content to blog on. Follow your favorites on Twitter and follow the links to their blogs. This will often give you great insights into the biggest and most popular posts on their websites. Don't forget to comment on their Twitter posts, too!

Google Alerts: Another great system for finding good content to comment on. Plug in the names of the folks you're following. Also, enter their blog URLs too! Often bloggers will reference a blog post and not the name of the person blogging. Having this link as one of your Alerts will allow you to follow each and every mention of this blogger. So, why do you want to blog off their site? Anytime a blogger is featured on a website, it's likely that site is one you'll want to follow too. Or, at some point you may also want to blog comment on that site as well. It's a great way to network with folks who might one day interview you or feature your book!

Tips for a Great SEO Plan

Frequency: I generally recommend you try to comment on 3-5 blogs a week. I also recommend you spend no more than 30 minutes a day ferreting through blogs and posting, anything more becomes a time-drain that will prevent you from keeping up this work.

Engagement: Remember that each comment is no different than a post you would write for your own blog. You'd never consider writing "great post!" on your site and leave it at that, right? You should consider writing short but thoughtful posts for your blog comments. Offer additional insight, another perspective, or a link to where the reader can get more information. Don't be salesy, that's the first way you'll get blasted.

Quality over Quantity: As per the above note: make it count. Don't worry about the amount of posts you do, but spend the time considering the quality of the comment itself. You'll find much better engagement and response when you do.

Where's the Juice: The SEO juice from this strategy will be apparent in the incoming links that are now directed to your site. Each time you post a comment it will ask you for your URL (if you're already registered on a particular site, the login will remember your URL and post it in each comment). While not all blogs allow follow links, there's a lot of debate on no-follow blogs and whether they are still good for SEO. What is "no follow"? No follow is a term used in the SEO world to describe sites that can block your outbound link (the link to your site), using a No Follow Tag. See this Google article for more on no follow. The No Follow essentially tells Google not to consider your link when ranking for algorithm. Even though you may get referral traffic, Google will act as if you aren't even on the site. Meaning, you may get traffic from the link, but no "link juice" per se. This deters a lot of SEO people, but my take is this: If a link from a high-traffic site will get you traffic, why not post there? We still see a significant amount of traffic from links posted on No Follow sites. Also, keep in mind that search engines pay a lot of attention to social sites like Twitter and Facebook, which are both No Follows.

The point being, a strong SEO plan should include blog commenting. Not just for the SEO benefits, but for the engagement and connections blog commenting brings with it. Consistent, high quality posts will not only bring you great traffic, but also fantastic connections as well.

Good luck!

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Reprinted from "The Book Marketing Expert newsletter," a free ezine offering book promotion and publicity tips and techniques. http://www.amarketingexpert.com

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9 comments author marketing, blog commenting, SEO for blogs

SEO Blog Talk: What's a NoFollow Link?

If you have a blog and link to other sites (that don't link to yours back), you are giving your PR (Page Rank) away.

Why should you care? Page rank measures your site's popularity. It applies to each individual page and post on your blog. The higher the number you have (0-10) the higher up your blog posts will appear on search engines.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with giving your PR away; it's just what happens when you link to a site that doesn't link to yours. I'm all about mutual links--they're like a warm and fuzzy cyberhug and can help you exchange traffic with relevant sister sites. But if you have a blog with a high page rank and want to keep it that way, you might consider adding a no follow tag.

How to add a no follow tag:

Instead of linking to a site in compose mode, click on the "edit html" tag (for Blogger), or find the section in your blog where you can edit html.

You'll see regular links displayed this way:



Change to:



When should you use it? Let's say someone else is placing a link on your site--it could be a guest blogger or advertiser--and it's linking to something that may not be relevant or you think is somewhat shifty. That would be a good time to use the NoFollow tag. Additionally, some bloggers and site owners simply use the NoFollow tag to keep and juice up their own site's ranking so it's attractive to potential relevant advertisers.

Personally, I haven't used it much on the WOW! site or blog. I try to link to relevant sites of interest to our readers and, truthfully, I really don't remember to use it often! But now that I'm writing about it, it's something worth considering.

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Leave a Comment NoFollow link, NoFollow tag, Page Rank, SEO for blogs

PART 1: An Introduction to Optimizing Your Writing Website/Blog - for Women Writers

One of WOW!’s Winter Flash Fiction Contest Winners Danette Haworth wrote in about a topic that is important to women writers, now more than ever—blogging and website optimization. Since website marketing is one of my favorite topics, I’ve decided to dedicate a few of the following Sundays to women writers looking to promote their website and/or blog and receive their well-deserved recognition! This topic can take thousands of words to completely cover, so I’ll take on one topic at a time. This is Part 1: An Introduction.

Danette Haworth writes:

“Weeks ago, I submitted my URL to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Technorati, yet search results do not list my blog or my name. (My name appears in entries for other sites (like WOW!), but not for my own blog.

Is there something I'm not doing? How can I be more successful in this area?”

I know this can be extremely frustrating for a writer who wants to get her work out there, and I had to learn the hard way. When we first started WOW! Women On Writing, I’d spent most of my time perfecting the graphics for the website, getting the layout down, articles/interviews written, but I didn’t even think, or know, anything about SEO. Needless to say, when we launched that first day in September 2006, it truly felt like a let-down. We had this great content, a fabulous assortment of interviews from well-established authors, and we even garnered an interview with the senior editor of Writer’s Market at the time, Kathryn Brogan. We were perplexed to see that our traffic wasn’t peaking, nor had inclusion of any of the search engines! It felt like speaking to an empty theater. There was basically no one visiting our site.

The learning curve started there before I even knew what to expect.

I don’t like to fail—no one does—but I like to GO BIG!! So I quickly learned how to work with that magical voodoo called SEO and website marketing.

Side Note: Here’s a little rah-rah cheer for women writers: today, WOW! Women On Writing’s traffic has surpassed Writer’s Market and Writer’s Digest (to name a few), according to the worldwide web statistics at Alexa.com. We’re very proud, and that’s super news for women writers!

So how did we do this?

Let’s start with what Danette wrote: She submitted her URL to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

For starters, the three search engines you mentioned can take six-weeks or more to have your URL show up and indexed. I still notice that to this day. We put up a new issue of WOW! and the articles are nowhere to be found in the search engines for a couple weeks. Our blog posts show up the same day though, but blogs are extremely search-engine friendly once you get them going. For website owners though, there are several things you can do.

Of course, we’re assuming you have killer content. After all, you’re writers right? So lets skip that part for now. We’ll get to that later.

Submitting Your Website:

Most websites come with a tool that lets you automatically submit your site to search engines. Or you can use a third party site to do this—there are tons of them out there. I’ve tried several and they all work about the same. For a minimal fee (usually $5-10 a month) you can take out the guesswork and have your website submitted to over 100 search engines across the web. And yes, there are hundreds, actually thousands, of search engines! Just do a simple search on “Submit your website”.

If your budget is tight, and you have time, you can always submit them by hand for free. Here’s a list of free submission sites: http://www.sitepronews.com/free-submission.html. This website, Site Pro News has a bunch of articles on the topic if you’re interested in diving in head first!

If you’re going to be submitting your URL, you should have a relevant title and description with key words used in your content. This is a whole other topic.

Angela’s Secret Tip:

Do you have a Google Search widget on your site? Sign up for Google Co-op ( http://www.google.com/coop/ ) and create your own search engine. Here’s ours: WOW! Women On Writing Search Engine. If you have content-heavy pages like we do and you want them to be noticed immediately, I add each page into our search engine so Google is forced to search that page. I’ve never actually heard of this as an SEO tip or trick, but just thought it might work and it does! Pretty sneaky sis!

Tips to Optimizing Your Writer’s Blog:

So you have a blog, doesn’t everyone these days? That’s one of the problems. How do you make yours stand out and get major traffic?

Optimizing a blog is different than a website, that’s why I’ll have to do this full article in separate parts to give you the full info. So, today I’m going to talk about blogs since that’s what Danette originally asked.

The blog is run off a different platform than a website, since most blogs are standard platforms which are usually hosted by someone else’s URL. Check the end part of your URL, if it ends in .blogspot.com then you’re not hosting it. If you look up at ours, we have our own host, meaning that the URL is unique and we can record our traffic and actually see in real-time how many people are visiting each page of our blog.

One of the problems with having your blog hosted by Blogger or something else is you’re basically in what we writers call “the slush pile.” But that’s not to say that you can’t pump up your traffic even with a standard cookie-cutter template. It may take you extra work though. But let’s assume that you want to be the best, GO BIG, and create a stir in the blogging world. By following these tips, you have the ability to do just that.

Give Your Template a Makeover!
Aren’t you tired of seeing the out-of-the-box templates that everyone has? If you are serious about this, hire a designer and give your blog that original look. But if you don’t have the money, try and customize the standard template with your own logo and color scheme. Do what you can to make it unique.

Feed Me!
These days every blog comes with an RSS feed, so use it. Make the most of it by adding a custom signature. If you don’t know how to access your RSS feed, or your blog doesn’t provide one, burn your own! Go to: http://www.feedburner.com. Decide whether you want to offer Full or Partial feeds.

Button Up
Get your own buttons and place them in a prominent position on your blog (usually the sidebar) so readers can easily subscribe and read your posts on their own homepage or RSS reader. Use an RSS aggregator to make it easy on your readers. Here are a few:

http://www.feedbutton.com/

http://www.bloglines.com/

http://www.technorati.com/

But one thing to remember is to avoid ugly button overload! Don’t you get sick of seeing a blog with a whole bunch of buttons and widgets all over the place? This also slows down the load time. Remember you only have less than 30 seconds to capture your reader. Be spare, but make those buttons and widgets count.

What’s Your Topic?
Remember when you start your blog, it should have one main theme or topic in general. Focusing on one area will definitely help your blog have its own niche audience. Being too general won’t keep the readers coming back. I know what you’re thinking, our blog, The Muffin, has a plethora of topics, but they’re all geared toward women writers. Your topic doesn’t have to have a narrow focus, but you should consider your audience and who your blog is catering to. Is it about fashion? Art? Motorcycling? Okay, I know it’s none of the above, but if it’s about your journey as a writer, or a promotion for your forthcoming book, then tailor it toward that. Make one blog for your journey as a writer, and the other for your book. Keep the topics separate to create unique content.

Write Like You Know the Whole World is Reading
Try and keep your entries short, yet detailed. Write for your readers and for search engines. This is possible! I prefer writing for readers, but you can do both. Just make sure the key words you use are relevant to your content. Use relevant titles and tags. Make your titles leave the reader wanting more, because that’s what is going to show up on search engines. Don’t just say, “Welcome to my blog!” Think of it like you do the first sentence in your short story or article—hook that reader, reel them in.

Check your spelling. Use nice readable fonts in a standard size. Create unique stories. Other bloggers will be more likely to link to your blog if you have a story that sizzles. They may even quote it in their own blog with a link and create a viral effect.

Juice Up Those Links
Link to other blogs in your posts. This is an easy way to make other bloggers learn about your blog when they’ve never heard of it. For instance, I do this every month: I check bloglines and technorati and type in our blog address to see who’s chatting about us. I find the most interesting posts from readers that I never knew of! And like I always say, if you mention WOW! Women On Writing, I’ll add you to our blogroll, thus perpetuating the growing family of women writers and bloggers. You can create your own blogroll, just go to: http://www.bloglines.com/

Also consider the importance of links. For instance, in Danette’s case, it’s better to link to her blog like this: Danette Haworth’s Blog, than http://www.danettehaworth.blogspot.com. Why? Because link names hold more value than simple URLs. People can list a whole bunch of URLs, but if it’s associated with a key word or phrase, search engines are more likely to pick up on it.

Angela’s Secret Tip:

Buy your own domain name and host your blog under that site. Of course, our blog doesn’t have all the cool widgets that blogger-hosted blogs have, but if you want to increase your traffic ranking this is a great way to do it. For instance, we have a Blogger blog, but it’s an FTP blog. This means that when we post we get that dreaded spinner that old-school Bloggers may remember, but you know why it’s worth it? Every time we upload a new blog post that counts as traffic to our website domain name. It’s like a unique visitor is checking out your site and uploading content. Bonus on traffic ranking! Shhh... don’t tell anyone.

Okay, as you can see this topic is endless. Things are changing all the time, so I’m going to dedicate Sundays to helping women writers pump up their websites and/or blogs. Stay tuned! These were just some of the basics, more to come next week.

Happy Blogging!

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9 comments optimizing your writing website or blog, SEO for blogs, women writers, writing blogs, writing websites