Blogger

Blogger

In recent years, weblogs have grown from a band of sharp-tongued outlaws to the darlings of online marketing. From Stonyfield Farm Yogurt to the Republican National Committee, it seems that everyone has a blog, or two, these days. Whether you are an individual out to bring in an income through running ads on your site or a large business with a blog on the site as a way to create relationships with potential clients, you are today’s Big Thing on the Internet. Naturally, the major search engines should be catering to your every need. But you make it plenty hard for them! Your site lives and dies by content that changes every day, so it’s difficult for search engines—which are also trying to index the entire rest of the Web, too—to keep up. Blog-specific search works differently from standard search. Instead of going out and wandering through the zillions of web pages on the Internet every day, blog search engines sit back and watch for changes that come in through the “wires.” This Blogger.

All the major search engines integrate blog postings into their search results, but the blogosphere, a common nickname for the world of blogs, is vast and wide, so you’ll still need to be very aware of blog-specific search sites. You can find links to current biggies and up-and-comers on the companion website.

Advantage: A Link-Friendly Culture Showing up on the blog-specific search engines isn’t going to get you very far on its own. Blogs are part of a very special subculture on the Internet, and you need to tap into that subculture to gain visibility. Blogs need incoming and outgoing links—lots and lots of them—to succeed. But, lucky for you, no other sector of today’s Web is as link-happy as the blogosphere.

The blogosphere is a very social place. Even if you usually cross to the other side of the street to avoid chatting with a neighbor in the “real world,” you need to force yourself to be a much more gregarious animal online. Time-consuming as it may be, reading other blogs is one of the best ways to connect yourself to a community, and ultimately build links and visibility for your own blog.

Challenge: Minding Your Manners Looking for links from other blogs? The blogosphere is nothing if not socially complicated. It has all the affinities, grudges, schisms, feuds, accusations, and drama of a family reunion, without nearly as much barbecue sauce. Your intentions are good. All you want is a little love! But break etiquette, and you could be mercilessly flamed (assaulted by messages that are the electronic equivalent of a slap in the face), your comments removed, and your membership downgraded. Or, maybe worst of all, you could simply be ignored. You’ll focus not just on gaining links, but on making friends, sharing your thoughts in venues beyond your own site… in short, really participating in the blogosphere. And if you care at all about your online reputation, one thing you must never do when visiting other blogs is leave a spam comment, saying nothing more than “Visit my blog!” Bloggers are merciless in their punishment of etiquette-breaking behavior such as this.

Challenge: Optimizing Every Post Since your site probably doesn’t have a traditional site map, with sections, subsections, and conversion pages, you won’t have traditional landing pages to focus your SEO attentions on. Instead, you will have to put your time into making every post a better place for searchers to land. All of the SEO rules we lay out in this book for landing pages—rules like including keywords throughout text, writing great titles, and using search engine–readable HTML text—should become part of your every post.

Does it go without saying that you are going to need to update your blog very, very frequently? We sure hope so. Since your whole existence as a blogger is about writing excellent content, you’re already well on your way to search-friendly site optimization.

Challenge: Domain Considerations These days, it’s easy to create a blog that shows up within your website domain. But maybe you started your blog a couple years ago, and it’s currently living on a free hosting domain like biotech-now.blog-mega-service.com, miles away from your company’s primary domain. Ouch. You’ve got some thinking to do: Bite the bullet and move the blog now, or keep it as is and try to leverage it from where it stands? There’s no simple answer: Moving domains is always disruptive to search presence. But change comes with the territory for you bloggers, and any commitment to improving your traffic is a change for the better.

Advantage: A Venue for Personal Touch Any salesperson will tell you that making a sale is about trust. If you are trying to sell something through your blog, you have a great opportunity to give your audience a chance to get to know and trust you. Aaron Wall of www.seobook.com is both a blogger and expert search marketer. His blog is one way that potential customers find and purchase his e-book. But it’s also a comprehensive, information-rich site that both helps others and bolsters his reputation in the industry. His advice to bloggers getting started and looking for SEO strategies: “Learn your community well, find and use your real voice, and link out early and often.”