Blogging to Look Good for Google - Some Additional Tips
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You don’t need to be a celebrity or a well-known businessman to generate this kind of buzz. It helps, of course, but it’s not absolutely necessary; you just need to work harder on the basics. You already know how important it is to write about popular topics, get lots of links, and post frequently. Let’s refine those points a little.
If you want to copy Ted Leonsis in writing a blog that’s appropriate to your business, you need to think about its focus. Who are you trying to attract? What are they likely to be searching for? You can’t escape it; you need to be thinking about the keywords you will use for your blog. But you need to do it intelligently. You can try a general high traffic keyword, but how much chance do you have of ranking – and gaining visitors – for that term? Better to choose a moderately popular term, which will give you a better chance of ranking, attract more traffic with less effort, and probably be more targeted (and therefore more likely to convert) on top of all that.
Once you have decided what keyword or key phrase to use, where should it go? You don’t want to be tarred with the spam brush, so you shouldn’t make an extreme effort to have the term show up in your blog; talk about topics relating to your blog’s focus, and the keywords should fall naturally. Other places you can put your keywords include your post titles, your category names, the URLs of your pages, and any Technorati tags that appear after each of your posts.
That brings me to another way for you to raise the profile of your blog: submit it to a blog directory. You can get some excellent one-way links this way.
Finally, I’d like to talk about timing and frequency. You’ve already seen that frequent updates are a good thing; Leonsis updated his blog several times a day. If you’re not writing constantly about current events or things that are happening in your life, this doesn’t have to be as arduous as it sounds. There is blogging software available that will let you write a lot of blog entries in advance and then post them at preset times. So you can do an entire week or even month’s worth of blogging at one sitting and not have to think about again until next time.
So much for frequency; how about timing? Well, it helps to know when and how frequently the search engine spiders visit your site. Spiders are regular creatures; you may find that the spiders come once a week or once a month. If you have a brand new post ready for them the day they come to visit, they’ll know to keep visiting you around that time. Now, as to the other kind of visitors to your site, you might find you get better results if you tweak your blogging software slightly. Instead of having it ping servers every time you update, or at set intervals regardless of when you update, you might do better to have it ping just once during the day – sometime in the morning is usually best.
Leonsis was able to turn his results in Google totally around so that it showed what he wanted it to. He did nothing especially exotic; it took patience and hard work, but it paid off for him. You can do it too.
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