Posts Tagged seo
Blog Hosting for Best SEO: External, Subdomain, Subdirectory?
Posted by timware in SEO - Google, Social Media / Inbound Marketing, WordPress on October 25th, 2009
Where and how you host your blog is as important to your search engine rankings as what plugins you use and how you optimize your blog posts. I have previously discussed the best WordPress SEO plugins, but here I want to discuss the importance of how you set up your blog’s hosting: 1) separate domain; 2) subdomain; 3) external hosted solution (WordPress.com, Typepad, Blogger); 4) subdirectory.
I won’t go into the separate-domain issue, but you can read Mark Jackson’s Search Engine Watch post about this option. Needless to say, the benefits to your primary domain in this case would be nil, except for backlinking from the new, blog domain to your primary domain. But because this blog domain will have likely been recently activated, you will have to wait at least a year before Google assigns it any meaningful TrustRank to the new domain.
As all SEOs know, a business should almost always host their blog under their own domain, rather than the other options mentioned above. When other websites link back to your posts or other pages of your blog, you want the backlinking credit to go to your domain, not to Blogger.com or Typepad.com.
Recently, a client asked us about setting up a blog for them and we told them what we tell all our clients:
- Use WordPress as the blogging platform: We love the incredible number of plugins and themes that are developed by the very large and active WordPress community. And we really like WordPress as a blogging platform (and Dan Cederholm agrees!);
- Install WordPress in a subdirectory: Install the blog under your own domain, in a subdirectory that has a keyword-rich name, eg /widget-sales-usa/) rather than “blog” (we actually use “blog”, but there’s a reason…) or “wordpress.”
HubSpot Business Blogging?
Not long after this conversation, our client informed us that they had purchased the HubSpot “Business Blogging” package, and they asked if this would be as beneficial to their SEO as having a WordPress blog. I decided to do some research.
Read the rest of this entry »
Optimizing Your Website for Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine
Posted by timware in SEO - Google on August 9th, 2009
Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, has done quite well out of the gate, gaining 3% market share in June 2009. And from this Mashable post we learn that analytics and research firm StatCounter reports the July results are showing the same trend: Bing is gaining traction, having gained 1.24% market share, up to 9.41%. In June, Bing’s increased market share came at the expense of Yahoo!, but in July it seems that 1% of the increase came at the expense of Google. According to StatCounter, Yahoo and Bing combined now control more than 20% of the search market, up from 19.27%, although comScore indicates that their combined market share in June was 29%, indicating disagreement over the actual numbers.
With this increased and growing market share, the fact that Yahoo! search will be taken over by Bing, and because Bing’s search algorithms differ from Google’s, SEOs will have to factor Microsoft/Bing into their approach to optimizing Web pages. The question is, How? Read the rest of this entry »
Maximizing Wordpress Blog SEO + General Tips for Efficient Blogging
Posted by timware in SEO - Google, Social Media / Inbound Marketing, WordPress on May 4th, 2009
Having set up various clients with Wordpress, clients who were interested in search engine rankings and ways to optimize their blog and posts for the search engines, I thought I’d layout some basics for setting up your Wordpress blog for ultimate SEO bang.
Also included here are some other Wordpress plug-ins & tips we’ve found indispensable for setting up maximum-efficiency blogs.
Google PageRank – How important is it, really?
Posted by timware in SEO - Google on April 5th, 2009
I’ve been a student and practitioner of Search Engine Optimization – SEO – for a number of years. And I have to admit that the Great SEO Pastime of trying to figure out Google’s search algorithm is both frustrating and endlessly fascinating, like reading a Thomas Pynchon novel.
As we know, PageRank (“PR”) – the metric Google uses to assess a Web page’s “popularity” – was the central innovation of Larry Page (where apparently the name comes from) and Sergey Brin when they were at Stanford back in the 1990s. It was at the time a very effective way to assess the relevance of a page by measuring how many other Web pages linked to that page, the content of the linked text (the “anchor text”), and the PageRank/popularity of the linking page. More recently, it is thought that the “theme” of the linking page and its relevance to the theme of the page linked to is also a factor in assessing PageRank.
Of course, all of this is surmised, as Google protects the secrets of its search algorithms as ferociously as Thomas Pynchon protects his privacy.
Even More Social Media Rules
Posted by Analisa in Social Media / Inbound Marketing on March 2nd, 2009
Intrigued and impressed by the hype around social media optimization, more and more companies are rushing out to “optimize” their own strategy when it comes to Tweeting, Facebook-ing, Stumble-ing and Digging. There are many experts out there who have been participating in social media since the early days, before web 2.0 was even a phrase, and they are offering innumerable tips on how to get social the right way…and use it to your advantage. But the realm of social media is not comparable to typical realms of marketing and advertising. When approaching a social media strategy it is important that businesses and their SMCs (social media consultants) know what users want to see and hear. Not pitches and selling points, but useful information and advice. You have to have the right attitude when it comes to sharing content. But that is by no means the only “rule” for using social media; there are hundreds of “17 Rules of Social Media” lists and articles already out there and this is just my own personal stab at the genre. Read the rest of this entry »
Do keywords in directory and file names help rankings?
Posted by timware in SEO - Google on March 1st, 2009
Of course, no one but Google knows how much weight is given to keywords found in the directory and file names. My own anecdotal experience has been that this does help with rankings. And it certainly seems to be the case that keywords in your domain name (TLD) provide more weight to your keywords.
On a Google SERP, we see search terms bolded in the anchor text “headline” (which is the title tag content), the description beneath the headline (usually the content of the description meta tag), and in the full URL (usually green text beneath the description. This indicates that Google is parsing or “noticing” the presence of the search terms. However, this bolded text in the URL doesn’t indicate how much weight those keywords are given by Google.
All the evidence I’ve seen indicates that if the title and meta tags, and the content of the page (using solid semantic markup) support the keywords in the domain, directory and file names, this correlation will result in a minor improvement in rankings.
I would certain invite others to offer their own opinions regarding this.
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