SEO 101

Using Blogs in SEO

Ross and John discuss best practices for Using Blogs and blog platforms like Wordpress in SEO, and downfalls like scraping, plus their take on tag usage and the best uses for rss feeds. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 36m
Broadcast on:: 20 Jul 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross and John discuss best practices for Using Blogs and blog platforms like Wordpress in SEO, and downfalls like scraping, plus their take on tag usage and the best uses for rss feeds.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The opinions expressed on this webmasterradio.fm program are those of the hosts, guests and callers. And do not reflect those of the staff, management or advertisers of webmasterradio.fm. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program, without the express written consent of webmasterradio.fm, is prohibited. Welcome to SC0101, your introductory course on search engine optimization. So, turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basis. Hello and welcome to SC0101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my co-host is John Carke, the SEO manager for MediaWiz. So, John. Hey Ross. How are you doing today? Of course. See you early, of course. Yep. My day's going great, it's been very busy, and I like it that way, I'm going to try to be busy even bored. Oh, doubt. Yep. Yeah. Busy here too, you're looking forward to the weekend now, so be good. So today's show, we're going to talk about blogs and how well they should be your best friend. And between John and I, we're both, I think, extreme advocates of blogs. It seems crazy if someone doesn't have one, they're just, they're really missing out. So I guess, what would you say is the main reason for a blog, John? The main reason for a blog, I think, sorry, different, depending on who you are, but. Yeah, yeah, definitely, but I think the overall reason to have a blog is to communicate with the people that are interested in communicating with you. I mean, and hearing what you have to say, whether it be for commercial e-commerce or just because you want to let everybody know your kids dancing to the Black Eyed Peas, you know? Yeah. That's a cute little boy, eh? Ross put out a video over the week of his little boy, but is it about your old now, right? Yeah, it's a year. Dancing to the Black Eyed Peas is pretty good. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. He's destined for a dancing with the stars, I'm sure. Well, okay. So we know what the main reason for a blog, and that's a very valid reason. There's a ton of other benefits. I mean, I've actually tried writing articles on it, and it feels like I could write a book on it. It's just blogs. Rule. You know, the first one that comes to mind for me is it helps build trust in a person's company. I mean, I know for me, I find it really important to write because first of all, it shows just how timely my knowledge is. You know, obviously I have to keep on top of things, I might as well show off that I'm doing that because you know, it's important to my clients that they can see that I'm on a cutting edge. And it's also a great way to learn new things because by having to write, you also have to research. If it's something you haven't done in a while, it's a good refresher. Yeah, definitely. And in title, that is, you know, the best way to gain market shares is to become the authority in your market. And one of the best ways to become authority in your market is to write about what's going on in your market. One of the easiest ways to do that online is a blog. So, you know, just from that perspective, you know, building trust plus building authority. Yeah. And another thing is, I guess we'll just rattle off a few of these, but I mean, I think one of the best parts, to me, it's just, it's like a playground is the RSS feed. I mean, you can do anything with this thing. It's just amazing. It's literally, people subscribe to your RSS feed. So for people who don't know that is, it's real simple syndication is essentially a feed that anyone can click on and start to follow what you're doing on your site, on your blog. Right. It sends the information to you instead of you having to go get it. Yeah. So when you post something on the blog instantaneously, pretty much anyway, it is updated to anyone who's following the feed. I mean, how cool is that? It's just like tweeting, in a sense, you tweet, you tweet to every follower, or in this case, you write something. It's fed to every RSS feed, a aggregator or a reader. Yeah. And there's a lot of tools out there that will use those RSS feeds for your blog. There's actually a one that I use and have used. I built a Twitter account called Top SEO Blogs. And basically, I took another tool called Twit Feed and found like the top 30 blogs that I like from SEO that I respect and put a feed from their RSS feed. I use that to, every time any one of those blogs make a post, a new post, my Twitter account is subscribed to the RSS feeds, puts a new tweet out about the new post that they wrote. So it's not my blogs that I'm posting out there, but these people have RSS feeds on their blogs and I'm taking advantage of it and publishing it for other people, for them. Yeah. And for example, one of the things I do to keep on top of things is I use Google Reader. And I've gone and I've subscribed to just about any feed that looks interested me of interest to me and I actually label it or categorize it. And when I get up in the morning and I get to work, I just click on my Google Reader and I get this amazing assortment of very powerful blog writing that gives me an idea almost instantaneously what's going on. I will say you kind of have to be careful with that because I did the same thing for a while and I started being really late for work way too often. So much stuff coming in, it's hard to get through and stop reading it because you can go to work. So yeah, you got to be careful. Yeah. Actually, I had the same problem with always no longer my homepage. Every time I open the new browser window, I was like, oh, what's that? You know, it's just so much going on, especially with social media. There's a new thing. Every day, it seems. Oh, definitely. You know, but from the SEO perspective, the benefit of a blog is content. If you're writing on your blog day in and day out, not only you're communicating with the people, but you're building tons of content on your site and updating the content on a regular basis and the more you do that, the more content you have and the deeper reach you have into the engines because they're going to come crawl that content and it gives you more and more pages and more and more long tail terms you can be found for on your inner site. Long tail. Love it. Yeah. Like if you think of something that let's say is a obscure term or something, I don't know whether we want to try to spelling necessarily, but something that's really obscure, something maybe someone's typing in something differently, you could do a blog about that and just make sure that worder is in there a few times and you've got to get a chance of ranking for it. Yeah, definitely. You know, and if you're paying attention to your analytics and you're writing a lot and you might start seeing people find you for words you had no idea they were looking for. You're looking, you know, why are people finding me for hot dog on a stick? I don't know. Because you mentioned it somewhere in a blog post as a joke and now people are finding you in the search engines, you know, you never know what will happen. Well, and you know what, that ties into something else sort of same concept, but if you were noticing that there's a particular key phrase that's sending people to your site, but they're bouncing really quickly because you don't have anything for it. Yeah. There. That's just a given. You start, you create an article about that content and you've got a good chance of snagging that business as well. Exactly. It's, it's like having another website, but there's so much more flexibility to it. You know, it's timely. It's everything you need to become successful. One other thing is with the RSS feed, you know, let's, I mean, that alone is a whole list, but you know, you can, if you want to get your site to be found more often or your blog to be found more often, perhaps you want your articles to get more reach, you can go and say go to Google and type in quotes, add RSS and all of a sudden you'll start finding all these different directories of blogs and you can go there and start adding your blog. Great. All of a sudden, these are different places where your blog can be accessed. Exactly. You spread your content around. Yeah. I mean, then there's RSS. I think there's actually, yeah, there's RSS spiders. I mean, these are essentially blog spiders and they're going around and they're also looking for this content. It's free content. Of course, they're going to want it. Good. Yep. One thing to be aware of though, you know, with the blog we're talking about from an SEO point, there are a lot of people out there and a lot of these spiders, as you just mentioned, Ross, to come out, to take your content and republish it somewhere. It happens all the time. I have a personal blog that I had up for maybe like a week just talking about like a band I was in in high school. And I did a search and all of a sudden I found it was on the article about my high school band was on three other sites across the internet and it's like, has nothing to do with anything anybody would be interested in, but they reproduced it. So they're just doing it automated, finding everything they can and republish it. So there's no real way to stop that. But if you want to make sure that your content is the one that's indexed in the engines, you just have a strong site and you build links like, you know, you normally would. You don't have to build it to each individual article, but if your site strength, the salt and stronger your site is as a whole, the better chance your content is going to be the one that gets indexed. You can feel it first. Yeah, exactly. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to touch a little more on on blog SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Are you happy with your landing page performance? Discover how to improve your landing page performance with conversioncredit.com brought to you by Engine Ready. Turn your underperforming landing pages into cost-effective sales-producing machines. Be sure you're not wasting your precious PPC budget. Conversion Critic Tools give you the ingredients to create high converting landing pages. You don't have to be an expert to use Engine Ready's conversion credit tools, but you'll feel like a landing page pro. 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Before the break, we were discussing essentially scraping blogs and how that's one downside to making sure your blog can be found online. But, you know, really, that's pretty minimal. I mean, you're going to get that anywhere. You're going to get that on your own site no matter what. In fact, with WordPress, I found that the other day, you can take anything, even a category and just add feed on the end of it and a forward slash, and all of a sudden, there's a feed available for it. Yeah. I mean, so repress is amazing. It is. So, everything out there, a lot of sites out there have the ability to have an RSS feed that anyone could exploit. So, don't lose sleep over it. Just, like John said, make sure your site's so authoritative that Google has Google and whatever other search engines are. I don't think there are any other ones, right? Isn't there Bing Ho or something like that? Oh, yeah. Something like that. Yeah, yeah. They're going to ultimately just choose your site as the originator of the content, because some of these guys pop the most so quickly copying your content that it can look like they're the ones that first published it, which is no good at all. So, how do you set up a blog, but, optimally, what do you think do you start with there? Oh, yeah. Well, I'm going to recommend to anybody doing a blog, use WordPress. I've been using WordPress since way, way back, probably five or six years. And it's only gotten better and better from a search perspective over the years. So, if you have a choice starting out, definitely recommend jumping on WordPress. There's two different forms of WordPress. There's WordPress.com, which is a hosted service like Blogger, which isn't bad. You don't have as much flexibility with that one, but it's still the WordPress platform as very search-friendly. I think you can pay like an extra nine bucks a year or a month or something to actually have it put on your own domain if you want to do that. But the best way to go if you have the capability is to use the downloadable version of WordPress from WordPress.org to install on your own server without a doubt that's the way to go. And a lot of hosting companies will already have that built into your hosting account, like a one button install of WordPress. Many, many hosting companies have that. If you find something called Fantastico, there's like a 99.9% chance you've got a one button install of WordPress. Yeah. I love it. I mean, it's just made my life so much easier. I got so tired of doing that. And nice thing too. I mean, all the updates to WordPress, all those things are so automatic now. It says, there's a new update up to WordPress. Click here to upgrade. That's it. Done. I usually wait a few weeks because like the first day, if you do it, there's people complaining about something broke, some plug-in broke, but if you wait a couple of weeks for your update, unless it's like a real serious security update, you know, any of the plug-ins that might have broke are going to be fixed by then. In WordPress, you can automatically update your plug-ins as well. So it's really simple. Yeah. And even now they've added the ability to search for themes and immediately apply them to your site, all within the WordPress. I mean, before you had to go and find them, download them and install them. But now it's, everything's inside. It's amazing. Yeah, definitely. This is a little WordPress lovefest, isn't it? Anyway. Hey, I'll do WordPress lovefest all day. I use it for our, actually, I was originally going to use G alone. We ended up using WordPress on stepforce.com. And I'd be nothing but happier that it's so much easier to work with. And so powerful, all those plug-ins and stuff. Just incredible. I've actually been pretty lucky. I run a WordPress meetup group down here in South Florida. And I've been getting some pretty interesting people to come in and speak. Last month we had one of the developers that are working on a plugin called BuddyPress and the WordPress forums. So I actually had a WordPress developer come in and speak to my group. And it's amazing. He was telling us some of the stuff that's coming out in the next couple of years. The next big thing is they're going to merge WordPress and WordPress multi-user into one platform. So the only thing you'll have is WordPress multi-user. Which means you can have, when you install your WordPress, you can have one blog or you can have hundreds of blogs on your site. It'd be amazing. I love it. And it's free, it's always upgrading and it's very, very well supported. So anyone has any questions at all? You can always get help from someone. Yep, definitely. Okay. So how should you set it up? Like to optimally? And the first thing that comes to mind for me is, first of all, there's a few different ways for your content to get found once you've posted any kind of content to WordPress. It can be through categories, through tags, through your archives, through next and last posts on the homepage. There's a whole variety of ways being found, right? Right. And if a search engine finds these, all of a sudden it has all these various ways of finding the same content, which is not a good thing. True. And it's not killer, but it's not great. No. And I think that the one thing to prevent the major issue there is make sure you use a template that doesn't publish your whole post everywhere. So if your template has the whole post and then the next post and the next post where you've got full posts on your homepage or in your product or your category pages, that's an issue because then you're going to have a real duplicate content issue. And a lot of templates, most of them nowadays actually, will print like the first 200 characters of your post and then hit them that read more button. When you're doing that, you're really limiting the amount of duplicate content issues you're facing because you go to the full post and it's completely different because you've got a whole bunch more content there. If you go to the category page, you have five snippets of posts and you go to an archives page, you might have five different snippets of posts, even if the snippets may be the same on both those pages, if they're different categories, there's going to be five different snippets. So you're not going to deal with the duplicate content issue nearly as much. So it's a good point. I hadn't even considered that. I used the read more thing as well and I love it because obviously you really find out when someone's interested in content because they click on the read more, you know, there's something interesting about it, which is a good thing. But you know, just the same, I actually like the block. In my case, I used categories as my main entry point on my site, but I put, you know, robots don't follow on the other ones, the archives, the tags, all those sort of things. Would you still recommend doing that? I would not do it for tags. I'd keep categories and tags open, but I would make sure that I never used a category as a tag or vice versa. They would always be different. So I'd never have the category of Ross's best posts and the tag of Ross's best posts. You want to make sure they're different because then you would have an issue with those two pages. But the archives and that kind of stuff, yeah, you don't, there's no reason to have to have those available to the engines because you're going to get those content spider other ways. But the reason tags and categories are good is because those both create thematically relevant pages, you know, and if you have different tags and you do categories, you get different themes. Well, and I just said also, reason point two, do you, you want to limit how many tags you have? You probably want to stick on a certain amount of them, right? So as you get pretty insane. That is a huge question. I've dealt with this in a couple of different occasions where, and there's really two thoughts. You either have a set number of tags that you stick with and you only use these tags and never use any others, or you just go free flow and have as many as you want. I actually have a client that uses tags, and I had their developer go into their database and pull, you know, just a tag list for me. What are all the tags you're using on your site? There were over 14,000 different tags in that record, they had 14,000 different tags. And when I went through it, and I did a pretty detailed analysis of their tags versus their Google Analytics and what they were drawing traffic with and what they weren't, out of those 14,000 tags, probably 70% of them had only been used one time. And then, so you're looking at 70% of 14,000 only being used once. Was it really worth building a tag for that? I doubt it, because you know what I mean? So you should probably put rules or guidelines in place when you're creating tags, only create a tag if it's going to be used on more than one article. I've seen people create tags that are just the same as the title of their article, and that's a ridiculous tag to have. And I've seen people create very, very, very generic tags, like target. I'm like, are you talking about the store, or am I shooting, you know, at bow and arrow? It's like, you've got, I always tell people try to use at least two words and be somewhat descriptive when you're building tags. But as far as do you want to keep it limited or blow it out, that's really a, a few call. How much do you want to manage? All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and we get back. We're going to touch a little more on how to optimize a blog and, you know, can any website have a blog? We're going to touch on that as well. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Friend finder. Friend finder. The world's largest online dating network. Featuring over 100 million profiles. And hot sites such as passion.com and fastcubit.com represents enormous profit making opportunities for webmasters just like you with friend finders ability to geo target and provide billing solutions and in most languages and currencies, you are sure to find our comprehensive network to be a good friend. Dear wallet. Get more traffic maximizing details now at friendfinder.com. Have a good weekend, Andy. Hey, Jan. Why are all the coders leaving so early? Doesn't your department have a deadline of like midnight or something? Me and my staff are here all night. I saved money on my staffing budget by outsourcing a lot of work to offshoring.com. I told them I needed a coder and they sent me profiles fast. My staff just filled in the little details and now we're having margarita night. Offshoring.com fast and expensive excellent and on time offshoring.com. How do you choose the right affiliate network to partner with? The answer is simple markethealth.com where health and wealth connect. Established in 1998, the markethealth.com affiliate network allows you to market and promote the world's leading health and beauty offers on the net. Start making recurring income and the highest payouts in our industry. Choose from over 50 of the hottest selling offers ranging from herbal supplements, skincare, vitamins, beauty products, weight loss and much more. Sign up for free at markethealth.com and start making money today. LPO, landing page optimization, Mondays at 2 p.m. Eastern 11 a.m. Pacific or on demand anytime inside the advertising channel only on webmasterradio.fm. Ok class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with John Carca, SEO manager for MediaWiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. Before the break, we're discussing how tags, well they can get a little bit crazy. You've got to make sure you don't do too many tags, you try and reuse tags as much as you can so that there's more than one for post, per tag I should say. So another thing I'd like to add to a blog that adds a little social flash to it is gravatar. I think they're cool, what gravatar is essentially is if anyone wants to comment on any of your articles and they will use their email address generally to specify who they are. And when they do that gravatar, if you've got to plugged into your WordPress, will automatically load their picture, which adds a little more of a real personal flair to the blog and really shows who's being on your site. Yeah, and you know what else is great about that? If someone sees your avatar, let's say someone goes to your site, Ross, and is looking at one of them and they make a comment, they see an avatar, they see somebody, then they come to my site and they look and they see somebody they saw on your site, it helps like build community. They recognize somebody from somewhere else based on their gravatar and they'll feel a little more comfortable on your site because they feel a little more at home. Yeah, and then make it easy for them to find your, say your Twitter address through your profiles and stuff like that, and then all of a sudden they start to follow you. It's just a great way, like you say, to create in that community. Another one is my blog log. I know a lot of people can put that on a website and essentially it just lists anyone who's a part of the my blog log community, it's going to list them in this widget that they've visited your site and it's got an image of them. Again, there's that image again, and that's why it's important to always use the same image. I've just tried to do that myself and go through everything and clean out all the other ones that I was using and just have one of me. So there's always recognizable who I am and I've been to that page. Yeah, I've been doing that for a while. I've even actually, last year, St. Jose, SES, St. Jose, I was walking from the hotel to the convention center and some girl came running up to me and it's like, "Hey, I follow you on Twitter just by recognizing my face from my gravatar." Nice. It's like, "Wow, I guess it could be kind of scary from that perspective, but if you're building your own brand, it's a good thing." Raving fans, man. Nice. Yeah. And the other thing is feed burner. I can't get enough of it. It's awesome. Yeah. What a surprise. Another free thing from Google. It allows you to essentially port your RSS feed to feed burner and it will track people when they sign up or follow you through your feed. It'll keep metrics on which articles seem to be the most interesting, which ones they click on through the feed, that kind of stuff. And it's easily ported into WordPress so that anywhere you go to an RSS button, it's going to actually go to the feed burner feed versus the resident feed on your site. Yeah. It's great to statistics that give you who's subscribed and what you're doing is just oh, wonderful. Some you can't get from your basic blog installation. Yeah. And God help me if their reach numbers are right because I've got one reader, if that's the case. I have a looked at mine way too long so I couldn't tell you if you're doing better me or not. I don't think it's correct, I would say. Anyways, can any website have a blog? What do you think, man? Actually, I think the question is, can any website use blog software as well? There's a lot of websites are blogs versus websites that add blogs. So there's a difference when you're talking about can a website have a blog or should a website be a blog? I guess it's the real question that I was thinking of. There's definitely a difference there and blogs can now be the whole website and not just be what you're used to with a blog with categories and stuff, but actually be your whole content management system. If that's the question, yes, things like can be a blog, but I think you're leaning more towards which people need blogs and whatever they don't, which don't, is that correct? Well, yeah. I don't know about you, but I always get, when I go and I do a presentation or a speech to some people about blogs and how important they are, I often get people coming out to me and they're going, you know, I don't see how I really need a blog or how it would fit in with my market. And yeah, sometimes I'm a bit stumped, I'm like, hmm, that's a good one. But, you know, I firmly believe that you just sit down and brainstorm, there's going to be some way to use a blog on your site and get that RSM valuable or RSS feed in there. And I think you're right. I think the key thing you just said was that the people ask you is how can I use a blog in my market? Market being the key phrase because everybody needs to communicate in their market no matter what you're selling or who you're talking to or what you're promoting or whether or not it's just a personal blog, there's a target market you have, whether it's your family use your target market because it's a personal blog or it's, you know, plastic manufacturers and you're trying to sell to other plastic manufacturers. You have a market and a blog is the perfect way to communicate to that market no matter what you're selling and who you're selling it to. Yeah. And that was actually when I got a while ago, a plastic manufacturer and I was like, hmm, well, you know what? And I literally said, passion goes a long way. If you're really passionate about what you do and what you sell, that comes across in the blog, first of all, and that keeps, it retains visitors and retains readers. But it also, it's a lot easier to come up with ideas. And you know, it could be, you know, that sure you create custom widgets based on what a client gives you, but why don't you just say, these are the latest ones I've done. Client is extremely happy. Here's the testimonial. What can you, what else can we do for the average person? You know, what, you can make it interesting, you could talk about different mold sets, what doesn't work, what doesn't work, I've got engineer buddies, so kind of some concept of what they do. And there is some, there's definitely something you can write about there and it's going to be interesting to someone. Yeah, there's always news in your space. There's always something going on. I mean, you know, it doesn't matter. There's always something going. It kind of goes back to what we talked about at the beginning of the show, Ross. It helps to build authority. So if you're going to be the authoritative person in your market, if you're going to be the person that is the expert in your market, then everybody turns to saying, well, who's the best person in your industry? And then you want them to point to you, you got to, you got to write and you got to be that thought leader in your industry. And again, that's the best place to do it online is on your own blog. And you know, you've got something to say and that's a place to say it. Yeah. And then back to going out to all the different blog directories, you know, doing that search for at RSS, you go to these different blog directories, maybe difficult on these really niche areas, but often there's a directory for your entire industry and you get to add your blog there. And that's another way someone who wants to track blogs in their industry, they can find you that way. Yeah. Definitely. And that's a good thing, especially when you're starting, you really don't have any link popularity for your blog, you have to get found first to get it. You know, that's the correct for the horse stuff. Exactly. And, you know, put some time and effort into your writing and make sure that it's well written. Get someone to proofread it. Oh, Lord, so much stuff we see get out there. I just don't know what they're thinking. You know, that's a good point about you're not the expert overnight. Don't expect, you know, your blog to have, you know, hundreds of readers when you launch it very, very often when you start a blog, you're going to go months before you see somebody comment. Once you can't get frustrated, you can't say, "Well, no one's reading it. I'm not going to do this." If you keep putting out the content, you keep pushing out there, you'll start getting interaction. You can start getting people, you know, that you see, you know, commenting and interacting on your blog. But it's not going to happen right away. You just have to be really, really focused and just keep going until it starts doing it. Yeah. And, you know, blogs fit so perfectly into social media. It's just crazy. I mean, you think about Twitter feed, you know, like you're mentioning, I think before, that's a perfect area for you to use your blog to post to your Twitter. So if you do post on your blog, instantly it's posted to your Twitter. That's great. That's one other way for people to find your content and get to know what you offer and what you're an expert at. Mm-hmm. Very true. And frankly, I do that on all my stuff as well. And, you know, it depends. My person, I can keep my profiles different. I've got a business and a personal Twitter profile. But the business one is probably 50% auto posts from valid content. It's got to be valid. It's got to be something that's thematic. But it's useful. People like it. And it's another way for people to either bookmark you or find your content interesting and then subscribe to your RSS feed. Yeah, definitely. Hey, Ross, can we give up a couple real SEO-specific things to do with the blog since we just kind of, we've talked a lot about blogs and their usage and how to create great content. There are some specific SEO-related things we should cover real quick. Sure. The number one question I get asked all the time about blogs, should I install it in a subdomain or a subdirectory? Mm-hmm. That's the number one question every single time. And honestly, I prefer subdirectories for a number of reasons. But again, depending on why you're creating a blog and how you're going to use it, that may not be the best solution. The general solution, I say, is subdirectories over subdomains. This is because if you're building all this content and you're building all these links to this content, it will help support your overall domain. If you put it on a subdirectory or subdomain, excuse me, it's not going to have as much support to your main site. Yeah. And the days where that used to count as a separate domain, sending you links, are not gone, but they're waning. Yeah. Definitely. There used to be an advantage to that. And I was the first guy to be very happy about jumping on that. I was all over it, but it's less powerful now. That's why we've actually moved away from using a subdomain. We used to have news that's step forth now, it's just step forth. So I think there's a lot of validity to that. Another one is the URLs. There's some fantastic plugins within our WordPress that will allow you to optimize your URLs automatically. And there's some great articles out there that you should check out too if you want to optimize your blog. Yeah, definitely. And the one plug, if I could only recommend one plug-in for anybody from an SEO perspective, even though at the moment it's a little controversial because they did something with a new update, but the all-in-one SEO plugin pretty much covers everything you need. It'll let you do this, manage your titles per page, let you have a separate title from your home page, allow you to manage all your metadata. Well, actually what you were talking about, Ross, it'll let you determine which categories are followed and no follow, or which portions of the navigation. It's a very complete package. Install it, play with it, but most of all, don't just install it and sit there. You're going to have to use it, getting value out of it. But the controversy right now with that plugin is apparently with the last update, when they updated the plugin to go with, I think it was 8.1. When you do upgrade to the database, it changes, and I don't know real clear, but there's a security issue where some of your major categories can be no followed and no indexed in the meta. So it's like they will be removed from the search engines, so you'll be very careful with the new updates. Well, and that's why actually I'm going to take another angle, I'm going to say headspace too. I love it. It does all what you just said as well, and I've found the guy who created it very responsive. I actually gave him a tip and he updated headspace too in a day. Nice. Nice. That's the kind of thing I like to see. Yeah, very good. I'll have to give that one a shot. Yeah, that's very good. And Yost, Yostevac is amazing. So you got YOAST.com. He's starting a new show here on Webmaster Radio, isn't he? He has. Yeah, I'm looking forward to listening to it, so I'll be working with him. Yeah, look for that, definitely. If you're listening to this one, take a look at his new podcast as well. Well, great. I think you're an awesome show. Thanks, John. Yeah, thank you, Ross. Good day. Well, behalf of myself, Russ Dunst, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and John Kirkcutt, SEO Manager for MediaWiz. Thanks for joining us today on SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. We hope you tune in for our show next week. Thanks, everybody. [MUSIC]