Update: This article was previously published on Yahoo Voices, but has been moved here to my blog because the Yahoo Contributor Network was closed as Yahoo re-organizes its business efforts.  This SearchEngineLand article alludes to closure due to Google’s Panda updates that target content farms, destroying the traffic.  I can verify that my article on blog tagging previously ranked #1 or page 1 in Google for a variety of relevant terms, but has dropped to page 2 since the last Panda update.  Since traffic is key to a publisher business model, I would guess the Yahoo Contributor Network, which is a user generated content platform that pays users, must not have been making enough profit from ad revenue.  This is likely one example of Marissa Mayer trimming the fat as promised when she became Yahoo CEO.

Tagging Posts Without a Strategy Can Damage Your SEO

The mantra “content is king” has remained true for as long as SEO has been practiced. A blog embodies this idea by providing a platform to publish an ongoing stream of fresh content. However, if approached wrong, a blog can bury rankings for an entire website.

Google’s Panda filter which has been running since February 2011, is designed to lower rankings of websites using crafty black hat spammer techniques to thinly spread a finite amount of content across many pages, creating the appearance of a large volume of content. For many years predating Panda, search engine webmaster guidelines warned about a very similar issue, the technical difficulty created by duplicate content often generated by a CMS (content management system). A blog is a CMS, and Panda is essentially penalizing duplicate content.

How NOT to Use Tags

If done wrong, tags can open up the door for duplicate content. Usually writers add tags to posts as an afterthought – sometimes with tons of tags and sometimes with none. They sometimes create multiple variations of the same tag for the same article, the way you might use meta keywords. For example, one post might be tagged with…

• consultant
• consultants
• consulting
• consult

Sometimes the same tags are reused for multiple posts, but often new ones are created for every new post. For example, one post may be tagged “ad agency”, and the next writer who publishes a post, instead of reusing the existing “ad agency” tag creates the tag “advertising agency”.

How Tagging Causes Thin Content

Because of the way tags are often used, there is a very high risk of creating duplicate content or thin content. Each tag has its own webpage, known in WordPress as a tag archive. And if there are multiple tags for each post that are not reused, you end up with multiple tag archives with the same content. Bloggers are told using a tag will help the post appear for that keyword. As a result, the common practice is to create as many different tags for each post that can describe the post. The result is duplicate content for each tag archive and risk of penalty. The common solution is to use an SEO plugin to place rel=”nofollow” code on tag links and to disallow tag archive URLs in the robots.txt file. This makes tag archive pages invisible to search engines. The risk of search engine penalty is eliminated, but so is any potential SEO benefit.

How to Use Blog Tags to Help SEO

The way to use tags to benefit SEO is to coordinate tags with categories based on rules. You need to establish a rule all authors will follow that prevents any tag archives from having the same posts as each other, or the same posts as a category. You want to reuse tags as much as possible. A way to achieve this is to use your categories to organize posts by one means and use tags to organize across a different pattern. For example, categories might organize posts by services provided and tags might organize by industry served. This will allow you to optimize for both service keywords and industry keywords with little overlap (assuming you don’t provide only certain services to certain industries). Another solution is to use categories as a top level navigation and tags as a lower level. For example, your categories might be dogs, cats, hamsters, etc. while the tags are the breeds of the animal, or maybe the color of their fur. Whatever system you use, the plan must be communicated to authors as well as the importance of reusing existing tags whenever possible.

The post How to Setup Blog Tags for SEO Amidst Stricter Search Engine Rules appeared first on Blend SEO.

The new word for linkbuilding is content distribution or content marketing.  Social media sharing, guest blogging, file sharing, RSS feed, etc community or network sites have been popping up to take over the role of what was previously considered link farms.  These are essentially the same strategy as link farms, where people join the network and share each others’ content.  Except, instead of just providing outright anchor text links, like this “home sauna health benefits“, the idea is to be more vague about what you are gaining in search results and encourage a diverse sharing that builds more diverse backlink profiles and social signals for the participating members. The issue in the past was if the network was not diverse enough and had the same members linking to each other, your backlink profile grew, but had limited diversity.  Now that link farms are actively being penalized, the more incestuous networks are the easiest for Google to identify, making these not just a questionable benefit, but high risk.

Review of Content Distribution & Marketing Communities

This is a growing list of content distribution networks that I am trying out, so that I can give you my honest opinion and review.  Please feel free to leave comments on your own suggestions and reviews of content marketing websites.

Viral Buzz Content

Thumbs Up
I like this service because it is free and it encourages people to become active in a particular category so they can share their own content, browse other people’s content and share it.  With the simplicity of being a aggregate of content in your preferred categories, with social sharing enabled, the concept is solid.  To ensure high quality, your social channels (essentially Facebook and Twitter accounts) where you intend to share content are checked by the system to ensure they are high quality accounts that engage with a good size crowd.  My own personal Facebook and Twitter accounts actually did not make the grade.  I was somewhat shocked that I was not allowed to share content on my personal Facebook account.  I may consider myself a thought leader (LOL), though I don’t have a large following in my personal Facebook account populated mainly with personal friends.  Nonetheless, I am giving this network a try and have already posted this Google Plus SEO article in their member sharing section.

Join Viral Content Now!

My Blog Guest

Thumbs Up
This guest blogging network is similar to the Viral Buzz Content concept above, though a bit more advanced in that people are not just sharing published content, but unpublished, unique content that has not yet been seen.  Sort of like an elance bidding platform, website owners and writers are connected.  The terms of use for content is based on preferences of the writer and publisher.

Blog Engage

Thumbs Down
RSS feed syndication service that is paid, ranging from $9.99 per month to $99.99 per month.  The syndication lives on about 5 domains, ranging from PageRank 2-4.  Not very impressive for the homepage of a feed syndication.  The promotions I’ve read, try to sell you on the link building value of receiving high quantity links from 3 websites.  Sorry, but I’m not impressed.  I will not bother participating in this paid RSS syndication service.

Technorati

Thumbs Up
Essential RSS syndication.  Enough said.

Blog Catalog

Thumbs Medium :/
RSS syndication website that used to give do follow links to all members, then restricted it to a paid option, but now that it has gained enough traction, it relies solely on providing you visibility to its audience. I’m not totally convinced on the effectiveness of their reach, but its a free option worth the time to set it up.

Atlanta Bloggers

Thumbs up Great example of an individually managed RSS aggregator website in a niche area.  Anyone can submit their website blog RSS feed, but each is personally reviewed by the site owner for quality and relevance.  Those that are approved receive a followed links from the homepage using the RSS feed to populate the title of the most recent 10 posts.

The post Content Distribution & Content Marketing Communities: the evolved link farm? appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google Plus Rich Snippets in SERPs

Google Plus search results appear prominently, with color photos in the top right column ABOVE paid ads.  These are the search results in Google Plus for the search query entered into Google web search.  Since there is only a small community, you have a chance to jump in now, ahead of your competitors and start appearing at the top of Google Plus search results that are inserted into regular web search results.  Additionally, there is a Google Plus rich snippet including your profile image thumbnail, inserted inline with organic results that links to your Google Plus profile.

Personally, I feel Google is bribing SEOs and internet marketers to join its failed community by offering extremely valuable (yet free to Google) webpage real estate.  However, here’s how to enable your Google+ profile snippet in search results.

Enable Google Plus Author Rich Snippets for Your Content

Nevertheless, a Google+ Plus share button for blogs are required to keep up with the Jones’s.  You may still get an  advance on your competitors if you set up your Google Plus business page before them and get a head start on building some community interaction.  Additionally, you will need to be sure your rel=author and rel=me tags are in place on your blog so that Google can credit your content to your Google+ author profile.  The link on your post to your author bio must include rel="author".  A link to your Google profile page must be present on your author bio page.  The link to your Google profile must include rel="me".  On your Google profile, create a link under “Contributor to” section to your author bio page.  Use the Google rich snippet testing tool to verify all the links are in place.  Yoast has a great step by step for implementing the rel authorship tags on your blog.

Google Plus Share Button Code

UPDATE: Standard Google Plus button now provides share functionality.  No code updates required on your part if you already have a Google plus button.

Currently there is no Google Plus share button available for social share platforms like add-this or add-to-any.  There is however a hack out there that uses the mobile Google Plus share code that has been adopted for WordPress.  I used the hack and installed it into this blog.  After sharing, the thumbnail, snippet and link looks like this:

Feel free to test the button and share article all you want on Google Plus

I actually use WP Socializer plugin to pull in ShareThis along with other social sharing button code.  It uses short codes for the URL and title.  Here is the Google Plus button code the way I am using it as a custom button in WP Socializer.

<!–Google Share–>
<div style=”float:left; width: 65px;”>
<a href=”https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/?v=compose&content={title}&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss – {url}” onclick=”window.open(‘https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/?v=compose&content={title}&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss – {url}’,’gplusshare’,’width=450,height=300,left=’+(screen.availWidth/2-225)+’,top=’+(screen.availHeight/2-150)+”);return false;”><img src=”http://blendseo.com/design/wp-content/uploads/plus.png”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss width=”55″ height=”22″ alt=”Share {title} on Google+” title=”Share {title} on Google+”></a></div>
<!–/Google Share –>

Alternatively, you can use this code to hard code the button into your template:

<a href=”https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/?v=compose&content=<?php&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss the_title(); ?> – <?php the_permalink(); ?>” onclick=”window.open(‘https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/?v=compose&content=<?php&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss the_title(); ?> – <?php the_permalink(); ?>’,’gplusshare’,’width=450,height=300,left=’+(screen.availWidth/2-225)+’,top=’+(screen.availHeight/2-150)+”);return false;”><img src=”http://path.to/plus.png”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss width=”55″ height=”22″ alt=”Share <?php the_title(); ?> on Google+” title=”Share <?php the_title(); ?> on Google+”></a>

The original code came from here:

http://www.stateofsearch.com/share-on-google-plus-any-website/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

Update: 2/27/2012…

Google Plus Profile Appearing in Search Results

Its been 3 days since sharing this post, and it now shows the Google Plus profile snippet with my thumbnail in search results.  I only have 3 people that have me in their circles (people following my Google Plus post feed from within their account) and 9 people in my circles (people who I follow).

The post Google Plus SEO: Enable Author Profile Snippet in SERPs appeared first on Blend SEO.

Google Panda Filter Strategy

I enjoy giving free SEO consultation and advice.  The following conversation string is copied out of emails between myself and the www.rocknrolltv.net?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss website owner who filled out the BlendSEO contact form because she abruptly lost rankings for her blog.  Per the website owner’s request, I have omitted her name throughout the conversation.

The unifying theme you can learn from this conversation is that rich, unique content is essential for organic search engine visibility.  Content is what the search engines rank.  If you have content, optimization is a matter of finessing and organizing the content.  As you read below, the ranking problem is due to her website being caught by the PANDA filter.  After comparing competitors and with an understanding of what  degree of thin or duplicate content trips the PANDA filter, the proposed solution is based on content.  There are some great SEO tips in there as well.

Website Owner:

Hello.

I’m interested in possibly hiring your services to help me with our site. We seem to be hitting some penalties with Google. Our site is a music news video show with affiliates. The affiliates give us coupon codes which we have to push. Several of the promo code pages have slipped drastically in the Google rankings and I’m not sure why. I used to be #6 or #7 for “4inkjets coupon code” .. now I am down around #80 or so. This has happened with a few important keywords to me and my income! Please let me know how you work and if you think this is fixable.

Thanks.

Greg at BlendSEO:

Hello [website owner]

You may have either been penalized by the Panda filter, or other competitive coupon websites may have popped up around you crowding you out of top rankings.  Do you have access to ranking and/or traffic data?  I see you have the Google Analytics code on your site.  Did you lose rankings and organic search traffic on a single day or gradually over time?  If on a single day, what date?  Panda filters were run in January and then approximately every 3-7 weeks afterward.  We are currently due for another one any day now.

My first impression is that you have a WordPress blog where the main theme of the content is centered around celebrity news.  The coupon code appears to be “thin” content compared to the news content.  The other sites ranking on page 1 of Google are completely themed about coupons/promo codes. One initiative of the Panda filter is to rank websites where the site as a whole is a quality resource for the search query.  You may have read that one goal for the Panda filter is to eliminate affiliate websites with “thin” content.  You don’t really fall in the category of a site with thin content, except in the area of coupon codes.  For example, there is a link in you navigation to a “Promo Codes” page that has no content (http://www.rocknrolltv.net/promo-codes?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss). There is not a real strong connection between printer ink, coupon codes and celebrities, but you may be able to gain back some rankings if you start blogging about coupon codes and building out that area of content.

Website Owner:

Hello Greg,

Wow. This is VERY informative. Thank you! I am formulating a plan of attack and repair now.

Yes, the loss in rankings happened suddenly. It happened twice which I thought was odd. My competitors with video shows and affiliates have also dropped so what you are saying in regards to thin content is making sense. Although these guys seem to be holding up better than the rest of us: www.emmaandpete.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

But all of us have dropped from the top ten as there used to be a little gang of us battling it out. LOL. (all content producers for the same network!)

Good point on the promo codes page. I shall remedy that.

I do have another site or two that I could use just for the coupon codes. www.thesecouponswork.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss It is a little out of date but I could update all of the codes on there and build out the pages etc. And then blog regularly on it to keep things rolling etc etc.

Would you agree that the coupon site would be a better approach and in the meantime, remove dupe content and maybe… start blogging about coupons on the rock n roll tv site? Sort of a two pronged approach?

I appreciate your time with this and if you have time to answer. Great. If not, that’s cool too. It’s hard to figure this stuff out when you’re a video producer/musician first and trying to do SEO the best I can … second! ha ha!

Greg at BlendSEO:

I think the strategy looks good.

Emmaandpete.com has a good amount of content related to the coupons as “Emma’s Blog” (http://www.emmaandpete.com/emma?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss) seems to focus on it completely.  Also, “Pete’s blog” has tons of really long posts with tons of copy about whatever he seems to be interested in…as well as “Cooper Acres” also has tons of text about it.  All this text content makes for very rich content.  Videos are great for users who watch them, though they only provide as much search engine friendly content as an image.  Those sections of Emmaandpete.com appear to be categories that get pulled into the blog loop on the homepage.  With all that on-topic content mixed with other rich content, I’m not surprised they did NOT get penalized for thin content.

SEO Tip

A good rule of thumb for length of text on a post is 200 words.

Also, I notice each of your posts has a smattering of content about several different unrelated affiliates.  You might have better luck if each post only talks about one affiliate, and goes a little more in depth talking about that affiliate within the post.  Working the subject matter of one affiliate into a post should give that post a more unified and stronger theme of its subject matter.  Using a couple links from that tighter themed post back to your affiliate landing page will carry more weight than one link from a loosely related post that also links to several other unrelated landing pages.

Part of the Panda filter penalizes sites that have too many advertisements on one page.  I would suggest removing the horizontal banner below each post:

and the one midway down the homepage:

If you do this, and narrow your post content to one affiliate per post, I would not be surprised if you bounce back up the next time the Panda filter is run (it has been run about every 4-5 weeks).

Increase Relevance to Improve SEO

You can take the themes a step further by coming up with a way of categorizing your content so that only certain affiliates are pushed with certain types of rockers.  For example if you only push diamond promo codes in articles that mention Aerosmith.  Or if you don’t write about Aerosmith frequently you could choose some other way of categorizing the rockers like old school rockers, younger pop stars, older pop stars, etc. Then divide up the affiliates and assign them each to one of these categories.  When a post falls into a category, only mention those affiliates assigned to that category.  If you consistently associate affiliate content with a type of rocker content, Google will see the pattern and associate them together.  As long as you use a logical way to categorize the rockers, Google has probably seen that association before among all the web content in the world.

Another way of building an association between the affiliate content and the rocker content might be to take a literal connection.  For example, pushing the 4inkjets in a post about a rocker who has a lot of tattoos, pushing ice/diamonds in a post about a rocker that mentions their jewelry, push match.com in an article that discusses someone’s dating life, etc.

The more consistent you are in presenting the information, the more likely Google is to recognize a pattern in your content.  This will strengthen the relevance of your content around your rockers and affiliate related content.  Google’s goal is to serve up relevant content for search queries.  So keeping the affiliate keywords relevant to your main content will help your rank better for your affiliate content.

Attract Relevant Inbound Links

This consistency between your affiliate content and main content will also help leverage your inbound links.  My guess is that your posts naturally receive links because of the video content and rocker news content.  The strongest inbound links have meaningful anchor text related to your post content…and those links come from pages that are related to your post content.  Aligning your affiliate content with your rocker post content also aligns it with your most powerful inbound links.

Website Owner:

This is incredibly helpful, Greg.

WOW! Thank you so much for answering in great detail. You obviously know what you’re doing and everything you have written makes  alot of sense!

I will remove those ads.

What about the 4×4 squares on the side. Do you think maybe keeping two of them is okay? Does it matter if they link offsite to a ‘conversion’ page rather than in the site?

Greg at BlendSEO:

I see you removed 2 of them.  It is fine if they link off site, but you need to have rel=”nofollow” in the link code.  Not a huge deal, but Google can devalue your links if you allow ads to pass PageRank by not using the nofollow.  This is what you have….

<a href=”http://www.budget.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/budget-coupon-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

<a href=”http://www.avis.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/avis-promo-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

It should look like this….

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.budget.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/budget-coupon-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.avis.com/roll”><img?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss src=”http://www.rocknrolltv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/avis-promo-code-125×125.gif”?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss alt=”Ad” /></a>

Website Owner:

My only other question for you is this.

Posts should be 200 words. Should I simply use my video script as the post so it is all the rock news? This would provide a post that is very appropriate for the site in terms of searchable terms and be over 200 words at the same time. Then… do what you said and align one affiliate with one rocker type thing and write about that as well.

Greg at BlendSEO:

Using the video script is a great way to do this.

Wow. This is really incredible. Thank you so much.

Okay. I was wrong. One last question. I assume I should not ‘go back’ and make changes to previous posts?

Greg at BlendSEO:

There’s nothing negative for SEO. It’s just your preference. I didn’t want to assume.

Another plan is to puff up the FAQ pages and other personal pages so Google knows we are ‘legit’. (I read that can help?)

Greg at BlendSEO:
Your FAQ, About Us and Contact Us look pretty thorough already, but more content can only help.

Thanks for the brilliant idea. I will implement it today and find a way to redo my categories to align them with affiliates. Very cool!

The post Free SEO Consultation Diagnosing PANDA Filter Penalization appeared first on Blend SEO.

How you setup your blog is crucial for SEO.

1. Where To Install a Blog:
   – Subfolders?
   – Subdomains?
   – Separate Domains?
2. How to Integrate the Blog into the Main Website Architecture
3. Optimize Website Navigation Anchor Text
4. Optimize Blog Categories
5. What to Remove from the Blog

Steps 1 and 2 (concerning blog location and navigation) were discussed in a previous article on the 5 step process to setup your blog for SEO.  As a quick review of these two steps, the strategy for blog SEO is to integrate your blog within your main company website.  Typical blog architecture creates a strong web of interlinking.  Blogs also attract links from other blogs and directories.  The inbound links hit the web-like framework of interlinking and spread authority throughout the blog.  Search engines naturally view a blog as a tightly interlinked section of your website.  That is why, if you want your blog to benefit your main website, it must be actively interlinked.  That means, install it in a sub-folder of your main website, so link authority will count toward the domain, not toward a sub-domain or separate domain.

Step 3 is your first act of optimizing your blog using keywords.  Imagine if you were a s search engine starting at the top level of your website.  The first thing you read is the domain name.  Optimize it.  You might take a quick scan of the text near the top of the homepage, and then go right through the main navigation.  What do each of the links say in the navigation?  What is the file name of each page where they link?  The internet is too big to read every inch of every website, so you pull what information you can from a quick preview.  Using meaningful keywords in the main navigation anchor text and file names is only logical.  And its something every SEO consultant can agree upon.

This concept carries right into the next topic, optimizing blog categories.

Optimize Blog Categories

Approach SEO for your blog categories the same as you would for your main website categories.  Each category of your main website is located in your main navigation and is leg of themed content.  Your blog now stands as one of those legs.  Within it are its own legs.  Pick a theme for each category.  If you are writing for the reader, than you choose subjects that you know your readers are searching for.  Carefully choose relevant keyword rich categories as the legs for your blog.  These category names will appear in the category URLs and provide keyword rich anchor text in the blog-wide menu as well as other links throughout the template.  You will naturally gain a high percentage of anchor text keyword density on and pointing to URLs with those keywords.

What to Remove from the Blog

Typical items you find on the side of blogs include

• categories
• recent articles
• blog roll links
• calendars
• date archives
• author archives
• tags

… and I’m sure you can find more.  These devices provide blogs with their biggest strengths and biggest weaknesses.  For every article you post, your blog creates multiple views of it, each with a unique URL.  This is great for building up a large body of content, however, take it too far, and search engine bots get lost in duplicate content.

SEO for Categories and Recent Articles

The strategy here is to become aware of the URLs created by each device and trim down the duplicate content, leaving each URL looking as unique as possible, even though most content is reused.  We already talked about optimizing categories, so those can stay.  Recent articles links can also stay, since they simply link to the individual article URL – the same URL you get from the read-more link or article title link to read the individual article.  However, you need to consider limitation or removal for each of the other items.

Blog Roll SEO

Your blog roll links give a LOT of link juice away.  This might be a good place to link to your main website or other online properties where you have a vested interest.  Some bloggers fill this area with endless links out to other bloggers.  In doing so, you just have to consider how much link juice you want to hoard or trade.  And in the trade, though there may be a reciprocal link sending authority back to you, the visitors that click off to another website may never come back.  Therefore, my strategy in the blog roll is to keep it in the family (unless you have a really, really good resource you want to list).

Calendars and Date Archives

I like to completely eliminate calendars and date archives.  Calendars are a long known source of duplicate content.  If a client insists on having a calendar, its best to use a rel=nofollow in every link of the calendar and disallow it in the robots.txt.  The Robots Meta WordPress SEO plugin even gives you the option to disable calendars and date based archives.

Blog Author Archives

Author archives can go either way, depending on your situation.  For example, if you only have one author, that author archive will be an exact duplicate of the blog home page.  But if you have several authors contributing evenly, your blog content will be split between them.  A nice long description from each author will further contribute to making these pages unique.  Category pages can be treated similarly.  Create a reasonable number of categories and assign each post to just one category.  Give each category a unique description of 100 words or more to appear on the category view and every category page will appear unique from the others, with just a fraction duplicate content on the homepage.  For example, if you have 7 categories and you set your blog homepage to show the most recent 7 posts, 1/7th of your homepage will be pulled from each category (assuming you write posts in a rotation of categories).

Blog SEO Tags

Tags are nice to keep in the template because they create on-page keyword anchor text.  They in a way have replaced meta keywords.  Create a tag for every keyword relevant to the article.  Spam should be no temptation here since these appear visibly on the blog.  However, I don’t like robots indexing those tag pages, since blog themes are pretty tight and after a while, the same keywords are reused over and over.  This means the tag archives pretty much look the same from one tag to another (duplicate content).  For this reason, it’s a good idea to disallow tag pages using robots.txt.  The bot will still crawl the anchor text link on the page, follow the link, crawl the tag page, but won’t include it the tag page in the search index.

The post SEO for a Blog Accompanying a Company Website appeared first on Blend SEO.

When it comes to blog SEO, everyone talks about title tags, meta tags, search engine friendly URLs (slugs, permalinks, whatever you want to call them)…  That’s all pretty common stuff and there’s plenty of information about the WordPress SEO plugins to help you find them and set them up.  But here’s the most important thing that no one tells you to consider – website architecture.  This is closely related to silo linking, but MUCH more powerful.

Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing clients are sent my way when they need a little extra above and beyond ideas, technical recommendations and help for their organic search engine results.  Clients look to our search engine marketing consultancy for advice, but make their own ultimate decisions on optimizing their website.  The trend I’ve noticed is that most people are uninformed to a certain level of SEO information regardless of what their consultant recommends.  The most common unknown is the magnitude of missed opportunity not optimizing their website architecture.  And this is the biggest opportunity for setting up your wordpress blog so that it’s automated SEO feeds optimization for the rest of your website.

1. Where To Install a Blog: Subfolders, Subdomains or Separate Domains?
2. Fully Integrate Your Blog into Main Website Architecture
3. Optimize Your Website Navigation Anchor Text
4. Optimize Blog Categories
5. Remove Certain Parts of WordPress Default Template Blog Navigation

So you already have a website and you want to start a blog to help improve your website’s traffic, but where do you put it? Maybe you already have a blog and want to leverage it to benefit your main website.  These 5 steps will show you how to set up website architecture to maximize the impact of your blog on your main website.  Compared to a static website, blogs quickly gain power.  Architecture, silo interlinking, freshness and pinging built into WordPress along with SEO plugins make it a powerful online asset, often seen by spiders as independent or even none related to your main website.  If set up wrong, the power will dissipate into hordes of useless pages.  If set up right, link-juice, PageRank and traffic will be funneled from your blog and into your main website.

1.  Where To Install a Blog: Subfolders, Subdomains or Separate Domains?

Do you host it on WordPress.com? Do you give it it’s own unique domain name? Do you give it a subdomain like blog.domain.com?  I’ve seen people do all these things.  A blog can be very powerful and can quickly rival your main website rankings in search engines.  But put it in the wrong place, and this power is wasted.  Missed Opportunity.

The location where you install your blog: subfolder, subdomain or separate domain determines the URL structure for every page, post, comment, category, tag, etc in your blog.  The goal of the strategy I will show you, is to closely associate your blog URL structure with your main website.  Where is the best place to host your blog?  Where is the best place to install your blog?  Installed in the right place, your blog can be used to increase traffic and conversions on your main website.  Here are a few options to get the most SEO benefit out of your blog.

• Your best location for your blog: Sub-Folder.

  Host it on the same domain as your main website, installed in a sub-folder in the root folder.  In other words, your main website homepage (or index page) is located in the root folder.  Make a new folder inside the root folder and install your blog there.  This will create a URL structure like this: www.domain.com/blog/.?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss  But don’t be satisfied naming the folder “blog”.  You can do better SEO than that.  Apply the concepts in optimizing your navigation anchor text to your blog folder.

• Your next best option: Sub-Domain.

  Does your main website server not support WordPress?  If there is an issue with your host server, and you cannot install WordPress on the same server as your main website…. all is not lost.  You can use a subdomain.  Install and host WordPress on a different server, preferably a Linux server.  From the service that provides your domain name, set up a subdomain and point it to the new server hosting the WordPress files and database.  I won’t get into the specifics, but basically you will need to create an A record for subdomain.domain.com that points to the IP address of your root directory on the new server where the blog is installed.  Now you should have subdomain.domain.com where the blog (hosted remotely) appears. As far as visitors and search engines can tell, it will look as though your blog is a sub-domain attached to your main website.  A subdomain is treated by search engines as a separate website, but if you integrate the main website architecture into your blog, it will appear as part of the same website.

• Your third, and only remaining option: Separate Domain.

  If you have already installed and launched your blog on a separate domain name…and it is already gaining traction in search engines, it may be best to keep moving forward.  You may miss out on a URL structure, but the remaining steps below will be your best tools for funneling link-juice and traffic to your main website.

2.  Fully Integrate Your Blog into Main Website Architecture

What is website architecture anyway?  Basically, it’s your sitewide navigation. Any links that appear consistently on all pages of your main website will be recognized by search engines as navigation…whether they look like navigation or not.  This includes text links in the footer, text links at the top, any left-hand or right-hand navigation, and of course your horizontal navigation.  The one caveat to this being any navigation that cannot be followed by search engine spiders (I’ll leave search engine friendly navigation to a later article).  So, any sitewide links that can be crawled and followed by search engine spiders will constitute your navigation, the backbone of your website architecture.

Now consider your blog as an arm of your main website.  Think of it as another top level category of your website.  Include a text link to your blog in your sitewide navigation. Furthermore,consider putting links to your blog in more than one location of your navigation…the main navigation, as well as the top or footer links.  However, vary the navigation anchor text linking to your blog.

Next you will need to put your website navigation into your blog template.  To fully integrate your blog into your website, you must have your website navigation appear on every page of your blog.  When used properly, your blog will attract links and bring inbound link-juice and PageRank from other websites.  Your posts will contain fresh (as in recently published), unique content that will quickly rise in search engine results rankings for long tail search phrases.  By integrating your navigation, the backbone of your website architecture, you provide a highway for the link-juice and PageRank (and visitor traffic) to be distributed throughout your website.  In SEO terms, your main website homepage and blog homepage will be the 2 most powerful pages of your website.  The architecture of linking and automatic SEO already built into your WordPress blog is then leveraged for your main website.

But before you publish this new navigation on your main website and in the blog template…you’re going to want to optimize the anchor text.

3.  Optimize Your Website Navigation Anchor Text

At this point, you should have a couple places for text links to your blog within your navigation, and you may be wondering how to name your sub-domain or sub-folder where WordPress is installed.  Here you will find strategy to optimize your anchor-text, folder names and subdomain names. In this step we are applying basic SEO strategy to the uppermost level of your website.

Your navigation is the main highway for your website.  Links in your navigation are like exits from the highway.  The text used for each link is like the exit sign for the highway.  Highway signs tell you what you will find if you take that exit.  If I rely on highway signs to find my way, I need those signs to be as accurate and descriptive as possible for me to quickly read while driving.  Anchor-text for your navigation links need to tell human and search engine bots what they will find when they follow that link.

Generally website architecture is planned so that different pages are organized by subject matter and accessed by following the navigation links.  If you’ve done some optimization, you’ve already planned to send targeted traffic to different areas of your website.  You should have keyword phrases assigned to each of the pages where your main navigation links.  Those links in the main navigation are the most powerful links on your site and should also use your keywords or phrases identified for the pages to which they lead.  If you have a page about downtown Atlanta, then your highway sign or link needs to say “Downtown Atlanta”.  If you blog is about metro Atlanta area, than your link to the blog should say “Metro Atlanta”.  In other words, choose a set of keywords to target with your blog, and create thee anchortext appropriately.

The same goes for naming the folder or subdomain.  You want your targeted keywords for the blog in both the links as well as the URL.  What you name the folder or sub-domain where WordPress is installed will appear in the URL for the blog and for every page, post, category, tag, etc in the blog.

4. Optimize Blog Categories

Continued in a later post on Blog SEO.

5. Remove Certain Parts of WordPress Default Template Blog Navigation

Continued in a later post on Blog SEO.

The post 5 Steps For The Best Way to Set Up Your Blog For SEO appeared first on Blend SEO.