Lesson #5
Here it comes, the dreaded SEO/Keywords lesson. Everyone relax. Believe it or not, this stuff is
easy—to understand and to do! If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t get it.
But first…If you’ve gotten behind or are just overwhelmed with the number of emails. Here’s a
shortcut you can use by going directly to the ACFW course archives. These archives are updated
IMMEDIATELY, so you won’t be behind. Here’s how:
Go to ACFW.com
Click on Member Home
Click on e-loops
Scroll down and under
visit loop archives click on Course loop
Once there, you can sort posts by author, subject or date. I recommend you click on Author,
search for Edie Melson, and choose the posts with Blogging Course, Lesson _____ in the subject
line.
Now back to our regularly scheduled email!
SEO Information
Like everything else in our world, social media is changing and evolving. When the Internet was
young and search engines new, a way had to be found to rank the order of websites that came up
during a search. With that, Search Engine Optimization was born.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is simply that, an algorithm that ranks websites when a
consumer types in a query. The quandary comes when you compare the goals of the consumer,
the specific search engine and the website owner.
The consumers want the most relevant information to show up first.
The Search Engine developers want that, but they also want to be the go-to search engine for the
most consumers.
The website owners want their sites to come up first…no matter what.
Although all these goals are related, they are different. And, with these differing goals, we now
have come confusion and competition.
In the early years of these algorithms, keywords were…well…key. The more keywords a
website had, the higher up it would appear in the list of relevant sites. On the surface this appears
to be reasonable. But, website designers soon found a way to trick the system. They’d load pages
into a site with nothing but keywords. These pages had no information, just repeated keywords.
This little cheat frustrated consumers, because it frequently meant the best sites fell lower in the
list. So the search engine developers began to tweak the algorithms and make them more
complex. But clever website designers continued to find ways around the system.
For a while, content was king. It didn’t have to be good content, just new articles loosely related
to the subject of the website. This led to content mills and article spinning (rewriting the same
information over and over again just enough so it qualified as new).
There were also requirements of links to and from relative sites, number of hits, then number of
unique hits, and hundreds of other little pieces to the algorithms.
Then came Google’s now infamous Panda Update, followed quickly by the recent Penguin
Update. The short explanation of both Panda and Penguin was Google trying to clean house.
There were so many websites using black-hat SEO techniques (cheating) that consumers were
getting fed up. Essentially Google cleaned house, penalized those sites that employed these
techniques and tried to restore more accurate website rankings.
So what does that have to do with smaller bloggers?
Personally, I think it’s good news. For me, I’ve always tried to deliver accurate, passionate
content on this site. And in the past, by NOT employing tricks, I’ve ranked lower. Now my site
is easier to find because Google is rewarding sites like this.
How do you deliver content that Google rewards, instead of penalizes? It’s really not that hard.
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Write from your passion. Passion is obvious in good writing. Don’t follow the trends,
follow your heart when you’re finding a focus for your blog or website.
Generate good, valuable content. This means correct grammar, as well as tightly
focused relevant articles.
Come up with targeted titles. Don’t throw out the keywords completely. But use them
to reflect the actual message of your post. Not sure how to use keywords correctly? Hang
on, there’s a section on that below!
Format your site and your content with the READER in mind. This means an easyto-read font, block formatting, and short—targeted—articles.
Keep a regular schedule. This is so critically important. Everyone who creates a blog
wants his readers to return. But how can we expect that, when we’re never home.
Meaning, we post sporadically and without apparent rhyme or reason. All that does is
frustrate our readers and prove we’re not trustworthy. There is WAY too much
competition for us to be lazy.
So, the demise of SEO has been greatly exaggerated. It isn’t dead—but it has changed. But the
change is leveling the playing field, at least until someone finds a way to trick the system yet
again.
Keyword Basics
Pretty strong statement, but in this day and time it's one you can count on. Look at an anonymous
business owner with me and I think you'll see what I mean. We'll call him Joe and he's a
plumber.
He's a smart business owner and named his business, ABC Plumbing. He chose carefully
because with that name, he had a good chance of being the first listing in the directory under
plumbers. That was ten years ago and that ad in the telephone directory kept him supplied with
customers while it made him visible around the community. But as time went by, fewer people
looked at the Yellow Pages when they needed a plumber. Instead they looked online.
Well Joe is a with-it sort of guy, and he had a website built. It wasn't fancy, but it did the job, just
like the old ad in the directory. Actually the two looked a lot alike. But Joe began to see his
traffic and customer base diminish. This was due to the fact that when someone searched on the
Internet for a plumber in his area, his website didn't come up first. In fact, it didn't come up until
page three of the search.
He did some research and found that he needed to add some things to his site to come up higher
in the search engine. He came face-to-face with the new acronym SEO. Search Engine
Optimization became his key to getting the name out about his business. So he started a blog and
began tweaking the information on his site. But all this began to eat into the time he spent
running a business.
At this point, the light bulb came on. Joe realized he was a plumber, not a writer. And this is
where we come in. We can provide valuable services to businesses small and large. We can do
what we do best—write—while allowing them to get on with business.
On with the Basics
The first term you need to become familiar with is Keywords.
A keyword is like a label. It's a short way—although almost always more than one word in
length—to state the purpose of your article. Articles can have several keyword groups or only
one. If this were a blog post, and I only had one main keyword group for this article, it would be
Writing for the Internet. You'd see this keyword in the labels following this post. You'd also see
some related keywords, Internet, Internet Audience, Learn the Basics of Writing for the Internet,
How to use Keywords Effectively.
I use groups of words because the point of the keywords is to direct the searcher to your website.
You want your keywords to match, as closely as possible, what someone types into a search
engine search box. People rarely type just one word because it gives too many options.
Here are the guidelines for using keywords effectively:
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Always use the keywords in the title.
Repeat the keywords at least once in the first 50 words of your article.
Spread the use of the keywords naturally and evenly throughout the rest of the article. (In
a 400 word article that would mean using the keywords a minimum of three more times)
Learning how to use keywords effectively can help your blog and blog posts show up higher in
search engines.
Assignment
Take a look at the last post on your blog.
1. Give us a short synopsis.
2. Give us your main keyword phrase.
3. Give us a Title using your keyword phrase.
Addendum to Lesson #5
And as always, feel free to contact me directly with ANY questions!!!! There are NO stupid
questions.
I've gotten quite a few questions about Google Friend connect and Networked Blogs so I'd like to
address that to the group.
I want to clear up an issue many are confused about—the difference between a
blog Follower and a blog Subscriber.
Often times the two are used interchangeably. They are NOT the same, and beyond that, one is
extremely valuable and the other less so. It's also likely that the two numbers differ greatly. For
example, I have 207 followers on Google Friend Connect and well over 800 subscribers. But
before we go any further, here are the definitions.
A Follower
This is unique to Blogger sites and looks like this:
If you wanted to become one of my followers, you'd click the join this site icon. Then, if you
have a Google account with a picture, your face shows up on my blog. It’s nice to see that people
like my blog and this is a way to see that others like my blog.
Also, if you’re familiar with your Google Reader, my blog shows up there. But, and this is
critical, those who follow my blog this way do NOT receive any kind of email notification when
I post something new on my site.
A Subscriber
These are people who sign up to get notification of new posts on my blog through their email
account or through RSS. The most common way of doing this is through FeedBurner. This type
of sign-up looks like this:
These people are infinitely more likely to visit my blog on a regular basis. And beyond that,
they're willing to have my notifications clutter up their inbox. In these days of email overload
this is a BIG commitment.
Bottom Line
While there’s nothing wrong with Google Friend Connect, I still have it on my blog, it’s
important to make certain you also have a place for people to receive notifications through email
and RSS. These are your subscribers and, when a publisher is looking at your platform, these
will be the numbers they’re interested in. And Google Friend Connect can only be added to a
Blogger (blogspot) blog.
Networked Blogs
This is something from Facebook. That should immediately let you know the numbers of those
who follow you through networked blogs will change frequently and without reason, just like
Facebook. For me, that would be reason enough not to participate, but there's more.
Networked Blogs automatically posts an update to Facebook when you put up a new post on
your blog. On the surface that sounds good, but it's really not. If someone clicks on that FB
update, they're taken, not to your blogsite, but to a Facebook site with your blog on it. This
means Facebook gets the visit, NOT your site. Also, most of the time, your actual site URL isn't
even in the URL window at the top of the screen so if a reader wanted to visit your site, they'd
have to click out of Facebook and get to your site another way.
And there's even more bad news. Statistics have proven that automated updates on social
networks do NOT encourage people to click on the site. We can all tell when something is posted
by a computer, rather than a person and we're all less likely to follow a computer's prompting.
So, if you're a part of Networked blogs you can stay or go, as you wish. But I wanted you to have
all the facts before you decide. Personally, I got out of networked blogs as quickly as I could and
rather than hurting my numbers, it's helped my blog grow.