There are distinct differences when it comes to web pages and blogs, not just in the look or navigation, but in the search engine optimization strategies as well. Sure, both need the usual villains of content, keywords and links. However SEO outcomes for each can be quite different.

Aside from the ease of creating multiple pages, each page of a blog will get indexed by they search engines. If there are ten pages to (or posts) on a blog, that is potentially ten pages indexed. A web page on the other hand gains only one indexing. Most web sites are made up of more than one page, however, extra one of those pages are far more difficult to create and require some knowledge of web page coding. Because each page can be designed from scratch, search engine optimization strategies can be fine tuned for each page.

Blogging requires little to no knowledge of programming codes, however your ability to fine tune your search engine optimization strategies is limited to the types of plugins available and how well you utilize them. It is much harder to customize each page on a blog.

Blogs and blogging can be great for delivering traffic. Web sites on the other hand are well suited to action such as buying, signing up to newsletters of or any other activity. Search engine optimization strategies for blogs require a focus not just on the search engines, but also with an eyes to the many social sites.

Search engine optimization on web pages can concentrate purely on gaining search engine result placement. Blogging and social sites fit like hand and glove as do web sites and search engines. Whilst more than half of many searches deliver blogs in the results pages, individuals who are looking to buy will almost always click through to a web page rather than a blog.

If you have a web site that is commercial in nature, you need to maximize your search engine optimization efforts to deliver targeted traffic. A blog in reality is a support service for your web page. Blogs need to not only target search engines, but also target the social community as well. Search engine optimization needs to take that social community into consideration as well.

A good example of this is in keyword selection. A web page can target keywords centering around the products being sold. A blog needs to expand on those keywords to include phrases that relate to solving problems, offering tips and providing information. The search engine optimization strategies for each can be totally different.

The best approach is to consider each as totally separate entities with totally different requirements. Your search engine optimization strategies should be separated and optimized for each entity to gain the maximum return for your efforts.

(Source) Here’s what I mean — let’s say that on your website’s homepage, you have two links to your blog. The first link is in the top level navigation, and the anchor text is “blog.” The second link is in the body of the homepage and reads “celebrity news blog.” That second link’s anchor text is NOT going to help the blog page rank for “celebrity news” because Google doesn’t appear to count the anchor text from multiple links to a target from a single URL.

Rand Fishkin is at it again. His experiment on anchor text is very revealing and it tells something that I’ve believed for quite some time now. Anchor text on a page that points to another page is only useful once for Search Engine Optimization.

This is important because if you use an off site blog to promote your website then you’re not really doing yourself any Search Engine Optimization favors by linking to your website’s page multiple times in each blog post. The best way to do this is to pick one anchor text key phrase and link to a particular page from a single blog post one time. It used to be that you could do this twice, but Google has changed its algorithms for links since then. Now, once appears to be enough.

Another change in the algorithms I’ve noticed is that sidebar links from your off site blog to your website do not appear to help. Since those links appear with every blog post you create, you are essentially loading your website with the same anchor text day after day. Not helpful. You are better off not linking to the internal pages of your website from your blog in the sidebar and just using your blog posts to do that for Search Engine Optimization.

So you’ve decided that you need to start a blog. Everyone else has one. The competition has two. You think they’re cool (now that you know what they are) and you’d like to start one. Is it good for Search Engine Optimization?

The real answer is, Yes, blogging is good for Search Engine Optimization - if you do it right. If you don’t do it right then it can water down your Search Engine Optimization. Here’s what I mean.

First, the two types of blogs for Search Engine Optimization: On Site and Off Site.

You can put a blog on the same domain name as your website and build your search engine saturation. That means the number of pages you have indexed at the search engines and potentially ranking for your keywords. Every blog post is a separate web page to the search engines so after you’ve written one year’s worth of blog posts (assuming you blog every day), you now have 365 additional web pages. But are they optimized?

With this type of blog, you have to use keywords, alt tags, anchor text, and other SEO elements in order to ensure that you gain the necessary mojo to rank for your keywords.

An off site blog is different. With an off site blog, you’ll still gain search engine saturation, but it will be for the blog itself, not your website. You can, however, build links to your website from your blog and that helps with link building.

Keep in mind, though, that most people in your industry will more than likely link to your blog posts before they’ll link to your company website. If your blog is on your company website, you may or may not get that link love. If your blog is on a separate URL then you’ll likely get link love - if your blog posts are well written and draw attention from other bloggers. That will tend to push your blog higher up in the PageRank scale. If you are linking profusely from your blog to your website then that PR will transfer to your website with each link.

That’s it in a nutshell. Blogging is good for Search Engine Optimization when done correctly. Most bloggers, however, are missing the beat here. To be the most effective blogger, you should learn the principles of Search Engine Optimization.

One of the biggest controversies in blog Search Engine Optimization is whether or not comments on blogs should be no-followed or do-followed. Currently, Blogger.com has strict comment policies and WordPress software comes with all comment links no-followed. If the blog owner wants to take the no-follow tag out and allow commentators to get some link juice from their comments then he will have to install a do-follow plugin. Some bloggers do that. Other bloggers don’t. But should you?

That’s a question every blog owner will have to answer for him or herself. You will likely get more comments if you install the do-follow plugin. But you’ll also likely get more spam. Then you’ll find yourself instituting strict comment policies like Michael Martine. But for every policy that you implement you’ll also have to spend time adminstrating. You’ll need to decide if you have the time to do that or how worth it is to you to pass on Search Engine Optimization benefits to your readers. There are pros and cons either way.

Pros of installing do-follow:

• More comments from readers
• More readers
• More content on your blog
• More trackbacks and possibly more traffic as a result

Now, the cons:

• More spam
• You’ll spend more time approving comments and filtering through spam
• Complaint handling from your readers
• Fewer readers and fewer visitors to your blog

When it comes to deciding whether or not you want to use do-follow links in your blog comments, you’ll have to figure out what Search Engine Optimization values are most important to you. When you do that then you’ll know whether you should install the plugin or not.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, claims that 1/3 of all blogs are splogs:

(Source) Maybe you’ll be comforted in knowing that this statistic was derived based on the number of registered Wordpress blogs (2,523,000) and the number of splogs that Mullenweg has said the company has had to purge (more than 800,000), according to Web Pro News.

The originator of this story was WebProNews.

I think, frankly, the figure is low if Mullenweg is going by Akismet numbers. Counting Akismet purges and saying that represents the number of sploggers online is just too conservative because everyone knows that Akismet doesn’t catch all spam. Some spam, as every WordPress user knows, makes it past the Akismet filters and must be manually deleted. That means the figure is actually higher than the 31.7% as reported by WPN. Just how much higher? No one knows.

Search Engine Optimization Blog Spam has always been a big problem. E-mail spam resulted in legislation early in the Internet’s life, but spammers have largely ignored the law. It is likely that blog spammers don’t much care about netiquette either. It seems that splogs are big business. If they weren’t then sploggers wouldn’t be doing it.

The big question is what should real blog owners do to curb the spam. Or can we?

If you own a blog, I recommend the following when it comes to dealing with spam:

• Make sure you have an effective spam blocker like Akismet installed on your blog
• Set your blog comment approvals on administrator approved only
• When you approve a comment or trackback, visit the website of the commentator to see if it meets your approval - if it looks like spam, it probably is
• This measure may be a bit too strict for some as it will discourage real commentators from commenting on your blog, but you can enforce a policy of having all your commentators sign up and be logged in before being allowed to comment on your blog

Combatting spam is everyone’s responsibility. You have to decide how strict you want your comment policies to be on your blog. With a little bit of defensive splog strategy, you can kill the spam before it kills you and your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

SEO Smarty usually has some interesting things to say about Search Engine Optimization and Internet marketing. I like her blog because she usually comes up with stuff that no one else is talking about or writing about the same things in a way that no one else is. Her uniqueness is a major selling point.

Of course, she is my competition. But I like what she has to say about niche blogging and branding. It got me thinking about websites in general and how this applies there as well.

Her final question, “How do you manage to balance between niche and general blogging?,” is a good conversation starter and I have a few things to add to the conversation:

• First, good online business practices begin with your website, not your blog. A blog is a marketing tool and can be used for branding purposes, but most people don’t purchase from blogs. They purchase from websites. I like the idea of driving traffic to my static website from my blog. Because the blog is updated daily, whereas the website is updated much less frequently, I have a lot more potential for Search Engine Optimization through the blog simply because it will get crawled more often. Therefore, each blog post should be treated as a branding tool, but also as an Search Engine Optimization tool. Keywords and anchor text are very important.
• Secondly, since your success begins with your website (that doesn’t mean you can’t build your blog first then your website later), you should give your website, or websites, a lot of careful thought before you build it (them). Do you want just one website for your business or do you want several niche-related websites? There are advantages to doing it both ways. Personally, I like the idea of one static website and several niche blogs. The website is designed to serve a general audience interested in the type of services that I offer. The blogs are designed to appeal to a particular niche within that general area - in my case, Search Engine Optimization and Internet marketing. I can see that in certain industries you might want to build a general website and several niche static websites, each with their own blogs, to draw in traffic. As I said, there are benefits to doing it both ways.
• Whichever way you decide to handle the general/niche breakdown of your branding strategy, you must give careful thought to your linking strategy. Owning several websites and blogs can lead to a confusing mix of interlinking that will hurt you more than help you. There are two areas to think about heavily - traffic channeling and Search Engine Optimization benefits. Sometimes, linking from one site to another can provide one benefit to the detriment of another. Other times, you can achieve both benefits at once. Think about that very hard before you start throwing links around.
• An elaboration of the last point: Networked sites are now frowned upon by Google, especially if they are not related. If you are going to link from a blog to a static website or vice-versa, or if you’re going to link between blogs, then make sure the links are not going to penalize any of your sites. This is one reason I like the niche blog with one static website idea - because all my blogs link to my website, but they do not necessarily link to each other. Since I have individual web pages on my various topics on my website then the links from each blog to my website serve my Search Engine Optimization purposes and my traffic generation purposes.

When it comes to branding yourself online, Search Engine Optimization must play a part in that. Don’t get so wrapped up in image that you forget about the basics of search engine placement. You can do both simultaneously through blogs and static websites.

Blogger.com may be the worst neighborhood in cyberspace, but it is owned by Google, which makes it one of the best search engine optimization tools in your arsenal.

Because Google is one of the most authoritative sites online, if you have a blog at Blogger.com then you could pass on some very important link juice to yourself. In some experiments that I’ve seen, a Blogger.com blog will improve your link building, which in turns improves your search engine positioning. It does this the same way that any other inbound links do except that, because it is owned by Google, you may get additional points due to Google’s authority.

This won’t work for everyone, however. If you are a spammer, you can count on getting your Google blog flagged and eventually taken down. But if you are not a spammer then a Blogger.com blog can help you. It’s free, which means you can set up a blog for about $10 per year less than you can by owning your own domain name. If you blog every day then the benefits should be close to the same. The downside is that you don’t own the property and therefore, theoretically at least, could lose it at any time. But I’ve seen business owners start off on Blogger.com and transfer to their own domain name after a few months with relative ease.

Whether you go with Blogger.com or your domain name (and just for the record, I support your own domain name), you’ll still benefit your business with an offsite blog.

It’s no secret that you need relevant inbound links to benefit your website. But where do you get those? Well, there are various ways to build inbound links to your site. Starting an off-site company blog is one of them.

Granted, a butt load of links from one website only go so far. But an off-site blog benefits you in other ways too. No. 1, you can attract traffic to your blog much faster than you can to your static website. You can then funnel that traffic to your website. Secondly, you can use the blog to increase the number of pages you have indexed at the search engines. Every page you create is one more leg up on the competition. Then there’s the link building aspect of an off-site blog.

There are two ways to build links to your website from your blog - using each blog post to link to your website and using your sidebar. For the most part, you sidebar links are static and won’t change much over time. Use those sidebar links to create relevant anchor text for each page on your website and start some deep linking. Every post you create will create an inbound link to your website from your off-site blog. Those links will register as inbound links for each page of your website and give it a big boost at the search engines.

The way to build links to your website is through each blog. Write your blog posts around a specific topic related to your website. Make them keyword-rich and toss in one or two links each post, making each link an instance of anchor text.

If you do these two things from your off-site blog every day, you’ll create a good collection of inbound links for your website. Use it in conjunction with your other link building methods for greater effectiveness with your search engine optimization.

Some WordPress bloggers, I’ve discovered, try to take their limited knowledge of HTML and apply it to their blogs. You can’t do that. The reason is real simple: You aren’t building a web page.

If you want to build web pages, that’s fine. Do it in a text editor and ftp it. WordPress was not designed for that. You can build really cool web pages in WordPress, but not in HTML. All you have to do is create a page and start typing. WordPress does the rest. That’s the beauty of the software program.

That said, there are some limited HTML code that you can use to enhance your blog posts. Even then, WordPress has tag icons that you can click on for most of them:

• b for bold
• i for italics
• link for hyperlink
• b-quote for block quote
• img for inserting an image from another place online
• ul for unordered list
• ol for ordered list
• li for list time
• more for creating jumps

All you have to do to use any of these icons is highlight the text you want it to apply to and click the icon. You’ll get bold text or a hyperlink, or whatever it was you were trying to create. Other tags you can use for which there are no buttons include:

• p align=”right” or “left” for text or images you want aligned and wrapped a certain way
• center is a tag you can use to center photos and text
• strike is a tag you can use to strike through certain words, like this
• u is the code for underlining a word

Beyond these, there are certain tag attributes that you can use as a part of your tag and code strategy. Title attributes, target=”new” for opening a link in a new page, height and width dimensions for graphics, and other similar attributes that you can add on to your tags are acceptable. You can even create tables as long as you don’t get too complex with your codes. But that’s about it. There aren’t a lot of other HTML options for you.

WordPress does not play well with CSS, Javascript, DIV tags, and other languages. Don’t even try it. You could screw up your templates and wreak havoc in other ways if you try to do too much coding. WordPress already has all the code it needs to translate your simple text into great web pages.

For more tips and rock solid information on writing and maintaining a blog, go visit Brick Marketing’s blog service page.

You might think there is no reason to have a blog. You’d be wrong. If you haven’t considered it before, here’s one more reason to start a blog today.

This new study by Brodeur and Marketwire shows that 75% of journalists read blogs on a regular basis. That’s great, and the study has some useful information in it. But what’s not included in the study, and I think it should be, is just what kind of blogs journalists are following?

Do journalists primarily follow news and politics, or do they follow business, sports, fashion, etc. What areas of coverage of they paying attention to? The study would seem to indicate that if 75% of journalists (broad term) are reading blogs on a regular basis then all types of blogs are being read by journalists. But do the statistics support that assumption? I’d like to know.

Assuming that the answer is yes then a company blog will go a long way to making you an expert in your field. You can bet that if journalists use Google to find blogs then when you are looking for a blog in your area of expertise that you could be the expert they call. Wouldn’t you want that to happen? Well, it could; and it all boils down to one thing: Search Engine Optimization.

The rules of SEO apply to blogs as well as websites. If you are writing about one particular niche area every day then over a period of time you stand a very good chance of ranking your blog higher in the SERPs for the keywords that are important to you. Instead of relying on hundreds of dollars for press releases you can put that money into your blog and become an instant expert and add credibility to your portfolio. When journalists need an expert to interview, who do you think they’re going to call?

Not everyone uses WordPress for blogging and if current predictions from none other than Aaron Wall of SEO Book, “In the next 2 or 3 years, Drupal will be the CMS of choice.” These are echoes of what Brain Turner of Web Pro News said a couple of months ago when he said to, keep an eye out on Drupal as a potential CMS for the future.” I must confess that before reading Aaron Wall’s article, I had not looked into Drupal much, but his write up got me interested and I have to say, it looks good.

Turner makes some very interesting observations in his article which I feel worthy of repeating.
On integrating websites:

I think it’s especially important to leave plenty of room to manoeuvre with video, because if you can make & integrate that into a website, you have become a TV channel - and that means potential syndication in the still embryonic but rapidly expanding IPTV market.

On Wordpress:

My problem as a webmaster is that while Wordpress suits blogs and small sites fine, it simply isn’t geared to community participation - featured author and commentator profile pages are not a default part of the set-up, plus Wordpress has never really integrated community forums.

I love WordPress as a blogging platform, but I do tend to agree that it is somewhat limited. Nucleus CMS is a little better, but still very much blog oriented. Joomla is an alternative and while it has some very good points to it, the blogging platform is just plain nasty.

On Joomla:

(Note on Joomla: I’ve never liked the structure or coding - seems a very bloated, over-crowded attempt to create a CMS that somehow seems to struggle with basic functionality. Having been asked to look at SEO issues with Joomla a few times, I’ve developed an complete dislike of the platform - so much so that when a charity recently approached me looking for free SEO work on their CMS, I advised they would do better if I rebuilt it in Wordpress for them.)

I tend to take a less harsh view on Joomla, it has some very good points to it. It is easy to install and pretty intuitive, but it is a little bloated and requires quite a bit of customization. In my examination of Drupal, I have to say it looks very nice indeed. There are a large number of high quality free themes and looks like it will be ready to go straight out of the box. That is a refreshing change. Keep an eye on Drupal, it looks great and I think that no small number of people are going to be thinking the same thing. I would say it is going to start taking off over 2008. I don’t see any established Wordpress blogs making the switch. Wordpress covers basic blogging needs and can be enhanced enough with plug-ins to keep doing what it is required to do.

A quick tip today regarding the branding of blogs. There are a number of things that you need to consider with your blog branding.

• Does the look and feel of the template match your business? - There is nothing worse than finding a template that is just plain inappropriate for what the site is trying to sell. Match the template to your industry in some way.

• Install to the root directory - I really hate to see blogs with /blog in their URL, it looks amateur.

• Create an original header - Headers build atmosphere, make it a good one and you will be happy that you spent the time.

Your blog theme is important not from an SEO point of view, but from a customer optimization point of view. I remember talking to an older Internet marketer that chose not to do business with one company because of its color scheme. It seems strange, but he had a point.

“If I start marketing their products,” he said, “I will have to stare at that color scheme all day long. It is too dark and it is too hard to read. I don’t need the eyestrain.”

The thing was, the site appealed to me visually, but it had a black background with a light gray font which, while stunning, was hard to read. In addition, the font was small, which made it an enormous turn off to my older friend.

Pick your blog’s theme carefully
All the optimization in the world will not help you turn a profit if your customers don’t want to stay. You can get creative and artistic with your headers and stuff, but when it comes to your basic color scheme, light backgrounds and simple fonts work best. Aim for a good contrast with a dark font and light background. Other than that, anything goes.

Blogs are a great way to build up traffic for your website. They are relatively easy to set up and manage. There are a few options for free hosting that are not bad, but from a branding perspective, you would do better to run your blog off your own domain.

Wordpress is one of the best blog packages out at the moment. I have used a lot of different scripts, some of which I actually prefer to Wordpress. When it comes to the crunch, however, I tend to go to Wordpress for the simplicity. It’s free, it is highly customizable and it is popular. This makes for a wealth of widgets, plug-ins and free themes that can all be used to enhance your blog and hopefully drive a bit of traffic to your site.

We all know that blogging generates traffic, but how can it be used to promote a website? A great way to pitch your products is by blogging to enthusiasts. This is not always easy as if you do not know what you are talking about; the fact will soon become apparent. If you are aiming to build traffic in this way, then you should ensure that it is strictly a soft sell approach. Hard selling on a blog looks spammy and people do not like that. There are other places for the hard sell.

It is not essential to sell your products and services in every single blog article. If the blog is interesting enough, it will keep people coming back and it will have people checking your archives. Think placement, put those sales articles in there, but buffer them with articles targeted at enthusiasts.

HTML links can help you to push your services. You do not need to hard sell on your blog. You can always link to a landing page if you want to accomplish that end. A couple of well placed links per article is all that it takes. Link to other blogs as well. The trackbacks are likely to have their site owners check your blogs. It is a quick way boost awareness, if only in the professional community. If your blogging is good enough, they may link to you sometime.

If you are interested in incorporating a blog into your website or would like professional advice on writing and publishing your blog, do not hesitate to contact us.