Blogging

Supernova Media Presents:

101

Visit and Like our Facebook page http://on.fb.me/KFujSu Go ahead - post your Social

Media & WordPress questions and get answers in real time.

Join our E-Club http://bit.ly/SNMe-club to receive our monthly newsletter, with practical tips to increase brand awareness and strategies for more engaging relationships with your clients.

Stay Informed

There’s no shortage of creative thinkers out there. What’s a little harder to find are creative thinkers who understand business. That’s where Supernova Media Shines.

We are a full service web company. We provide our customers with a uniform custom branded web presence.

At Supernova Media we specialize in the speedy setup of WordPress websites & blogs. All our websites are mobile friendly, have onsite search engine optimization and social media integration.

It Starts With Passion

What is a Blog?

"Blog" is an abbreviated version of "weblog," which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog features diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites, usually presented as a list of entries in reverse chronological order. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.

Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, home staging, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all types of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author's daily life and thoughts.

Blog Structure

Generally speaking (although there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:

• A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.

• An archive of older articles.

• A way for people to leave comments about the articles.

• A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a "blogroll".

• One or more "feeds" like RSS, Atom or RDF files.

Some blogs may have additional features beyond these.

Blog Structure

Blog Content

Content is the raison d'être for any web site. Retail sites feature a catalog of products. University sites contain information about their campuses, curriculum, and faculty. News sites show the latest news stories. For a personal blog, you might have a bunch of observations, or reviews. Without some sort of updated content, there is little reason to visit a web site more than once.

On a blog, the content consists of articles (also sometimes called "posts" or "entries") that the author(s) writes. Yes, some blogs have multiple authors, each writing his/her own articles. Typically, blog authors compose their articles in a web-based interface, built into the blogging system itself. Some blogging systems also support the ability to use stand-alone "weblog client" software, which allows authors to write articles offline and upload them at a later time.

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

On Site SEO Techniques

Search engines can get readers to your blog through the keyword phrases they type on the search bar. If your blog post is optimized for that keyword, then it will be ranked higher of search engine results pages (SERPs). The more visible your content is, the more people will find you.

Use Keyword Rich Content- Identify a few keywords for your article that you’re hoping will get indexed high by Google. Don’t pick too many but consider these questions:

• How do I want people to find this post in search engines?• What will they type into Google if they want information on

the topic I’m writing?• How would I find information on this topic in the search

engines?• What results come up when I do plug these keywords into

Google?

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

The answer to these questions will give you a hint as to what words you’ll want to see repeated throughout your article a number of times.

These keywords will need to be the most common words used in your article. Use them in some or all of the following ways:

• Keywords in post and page titles • How would I find information on this topic in the search engines?• What results come up when I do plug these keywords into

Google?• Keywords in outbound links. Of course you should always link to

sources of content as an ethical consideration but the bonus of this is that many SEO experts think that linking to relevant and quality sites on the same topic of your post with good keywords can also add credibility to YOUR post also.

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

• Keywords in bold tags (try do it at least once)

• Keywords in image alt tags

• Keywords in the general throughout the text of your post – but especially early on in the first few sentences

• Keywords in meta tags

Of course you can go over the top with keywords in posts and let it destroy your content – but if it fits with what you’ve written tweak it to include the words you are targeting a couple of extra times. I recommend between 2.5 and 5% keyword density.

Check your keyword density here www.keyworddensity.com

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

Write optimal length posts – there is some thought going around the Search Engine Optimization community that pages that are too short can get passed over for high rankings. SEO experts also say extremely long posts will not rank better either, so try not to exceed the 1000 words limit. I try to keep posts at least 250 words.

So how do you count your words?

Use this online word counter tool.

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

Update regularly – The more you update your blog the more often Search Engines will send their crawlers to your site to index it. This will mean your new articles could appear in the index within days or even hours rather than weeks. This is a natural benefit of blogging – make the most of it!

Length- Another important factor you should consider when deciding how often you will be updating your blog is the length of the article. It can be really boring to your readers if you keep writing several thousand word articles everyday but they will be far more okay with two or three of those in a week, or several each day at 250-300 words.

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

Have Descriptive Titles - Some blog software actually makes your entry titles seem pretty repetitious in the search engine result pages, and can result in a lower click through than you might have had otherwise with highly optimized titles.

Just say you want to find out what’s happening in the world of red potatoes. You’ll probably type into Google the word “red potatoes”– not spuds, pots, crisps, tubers, tots or taters. When you carry out an Internet search, you try to be as specific as possible and narrow it down to a few keywords, so it only makes sense that you make your titles as specific as possible, too.

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

Write Compelling Snippets/Descriptions - If you do use snippets for your RSS feed, be sure to make them compelling or leave readers with a cliffhanger to encourage them to click and read the full entry. It’s the place where you raise your readers’, or potential readers’ expectations, tweak their curiosity level, or even better, plant the idea in their heads that what your article is about to tell them is something they don’t know yet. This will get you many more readers to your entries than just using the default option of including the first X number of words in the blog post as the snippet. Use your excerpts to generate interest and clicks.

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

6. Be Aware of Your Anchor Text – When you link to someone’s blog entry, or even a previous blog entry on your own site, make sure you link well. This means instead of linking to someone’s blog entry with the anchor text “click here”, you link to them using anchor text related to the blog entry, such as “Jason’s scoop on the new Widget Xbox 360 game”.

The Main places you’ll want to add anchor text are either at highly relevant points in a post – for example when you want to share a link to find out more about a subject briefly mentioned, or towards the beginning or end of a post, where you’re suggesting relevant preliminary or follow up posts.

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

Interlink your Site – The way Search Engines index your blog is to send little robot crawlers to your site to track what you’ve written and follow the links. Make it easier for them to get around your blog by using internal linking wisely. – if you have a few listings that you particularly want to do well in the SE’s make sure they are linked to from every page on your blog.

Making sure that content on your blog is properly inter-linked can help you in a number of ways. 

• Usefulness to readers• Search engine optimization (SEO)• Increase page views

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

Use Great Categories - When you write a post, place it in 1 to 3 different categories related to the post. For example, and article on the television show Grey’s Anatomy could go under “Grey’s Anatomy” and “ABC”. Avoid the temptation to add it to ten different categories though, such as including “drama,” “hospital,” “interns” and “Seattle” because that is just overkill. But if you wrote something great on Grey’s Anatomy, you have made it easy for your reader to find all your posts on Grey’s Anatomy because they simply have to click on the category link at the top or bottom of the entry.

The other thing to remember about using categories and tags is to make them relevant. Don’t go all crazy with random category names that really do not describe the content inside. If you have posts about WordPress Plugins, then categorize them under “WordPress” or “WordPress Plugins”, not “My blog software”.

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

The Time Factor

One more element that I think is often overlooked in SEO tips posts is that of ‘Time’.

My own experience of blogging is that you can do all of the above things and still not be ranked well in the Search Engines for months and months. Here at Supernova Studios it actually took around a year before I started to get significant search engine traffic- despite me doing all the ‘right things’.

8 Tips for Successful Blogging

WordPress is one of the most popular content management and blog publishing applications available on the web today. First released in as a basic blog engine, WordPress is now a full-featured, fully customizable website creation tool used by millions of individuals, businesses and organizations around the world.WordPress is most popular for its packaged application, which can be downloaded for free at WordPress.org and installed anywhere as the basis, platform, and structure for an entire website. It also offers free blog services online at WordPress.com.

WordPress

Because it is open source—meaning simply that all of its code and files are free to use, customize, and enhance—WordPress technology has been harnessed by thousands. From curious individuals to freelance professionals to Fortune 500 companies, people all over the world use WordPress because of its many powerful features. These include a templating system, workflow, search-engine friendly link structures, advanced content categorization, and more.

For more information on WordPress, check out our WordPress 101 Presentation.

WordPress

Being Passionate comes easy when you genuinely enjoy what you do. We offer an array of services at Supernova Media but here’s what we do best:

• Web Design & Hosting• Consulting• Branding• Virtual Tours

We know that your success is our success. Contact Us

Our Services

Nancy is a business owner, educator, and business strategist with more than 20 years experience. When she is not advising and teaching people about social media, Nancy spends a lot of her own time using social media.

Find Nancy online:

Google+ : Nancy Bain

Follow Nancy on Twitter

Visit her Website

Follow her Blog

Like Supernova Media on

Facebook

Find her on LinkedIn

And visit her YouTube Channel

About Nancy Bain