How Blogging Benefits Your Web Site

By John Eberhard

Many people don’t realize that there are some great benefits to blogging. By writing regular articles (300-500 words) or shorter blog posts (100-200 words) you can drive a significant amount of traffic to your blog and then to your main web site. And unlike many other types of promotion, both online and off, it’s free.

I have several blogs: one for posting my marketing articles, one for press releases about my company, and one for client news, which contains press releases from my clients. I post something to my articles blog a minimum of once a week. Once I post that article, I send out a notification, called a “ping,” to a group of about 30 blog search engines.

Once that ping goes out, all those search engines will in short order come to the blog and get the new content incorporated into their search engine content. So when people go to those search engines looking for content on the topics I write about, such as website marketing, blogging, pay per click advertising, social media marketing, and so on, my articles will come up.

This drives a significant amount of traffic to my blogs. Then, my blogs are set up with sidebars that have links to items of interest on my main web site. Like my services, a book that I sell, and some free eBooks that I offer. So a certain number of those people will come to my main web site. Plus I also have a newsletter signup and direct contact information on the blog itself.

In my case, in the Internet marketing field, my blogs generate three times as much traffic to my main web site as does Google, and in fact the blogs are the single largest source of traffic to my main web site.

On the other hand, it is important to realize that blogs are good for some people and maybe not for others.

I personally think that blogs work better for companies that sell products or services nationally or internationally, as opposed to a business that serves one small local area. It’s not that a blog can’t work for a local business – I have a dance studio client with a blog that does well with it – but it’s just that by pinging the blog search engines, you can’t guarantee you’re going to get all local people. The people coming will likely be from all over.

And a blog works best for a business that is willing to write new content regularly. I put up something every week, and I think that posting something once a week or more often is ideal.

But on the other hand, you don’t have to write 500 words for every article like I do. You can just write 100 words or even less. You can find some video of interest that relates to your industry and post that, using the embed code on YouTube so the video player will appear right in your blog. You can post links to articles of interest written by other people that you found and thought would be of interest to your public.

Using these methods, blogging can be a powerful tool to generate traffic.

 

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Checking Your Website’s Ranking on Search Engines

by John Eberhard

How well your website ranks on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) determines to a large extent how much traffic your website will get. There are other sources of traffic (blogs, social media, sending email) but search engine traffic is one of the biggest ones.

First I should explain that a website does not just rank well or poorly on a search engine. It ranks well or poorly for a given keyword. The sequence of actions to getting good keyword rankings on the major search engines is:

1. Do keyword research to find the gold nuggets, the keywords that have good traffic but not tons of sites competing for them.
2. Do SEO (search engine optimization) on the site to put those keywords onto the site in all appropriate places.
3. Do a link building campaign to build up the number of links to your site coming from other sites. See my last article for specifics on what to do here.

So once you do all that, what now? How do you check whether your campaign is working? It’s all intangible, existing in invisible computer bits and bytes somewhere. How can you see whether you are making progress?

Something I started doing a few years ago for our link building clients, is a monthly report that includes a search engine ranking grid. It looks like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google June 2010	Yahoo June 2010	MSN June 2010
Keyword #1	15	Not top 500	109
Keyword #2	66	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword #3	63	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword #4	123	25	Not top 500
Keyword #5	20	Not top 500	78
Keyword #6	10	485	115
Keyword #7	261	54	Not top 500
Keyword #8	5	7	2

(Actual keywords have been changed to protect the innocent.)

The point of this is that we can see month to month, how well we are doing in terms of the website’s ranking for the various keywords that we are targeting for the client. Then I do a tally on how many #1 keywords, top ten, etc., we have each month.

I get this information using software called Market Samurai. I don’t enter each keyword by hand and scroll through hundreds of listings.

Keyword Rankings Summary	Mar 2010	Apr 2010	May 2010	June 2010
Keywords with #1 position	4	4	5	8
Top ten keywords including #1s	20	19	19	23
Top 20 keywords including #1s and top tens	30	26	34	32
Top 100 keywords including #1s and top tens	66	62	78	81
Top 500 keywords including #1s, top 10s, top 100s	101	100	115	125

With this information, I can now see how we are doing month to month. If your link building program is working, you should see the number of keywords in each category going up. There will be some fluctuation, but over time they should be going up.

You may wonder why I even care about whether our site is ranking for a keyword at the #485 position. That’s not going to get you any traffic, right? That’s right, it won’t. No one is going to scroll through 48 pages of Google results to get to your listing. In fact, until your site breaks the top 20 in terms of ranking for a keyword, you’re not going to see much traffic from it.

The point is that our SEO and link building actions will start working by getting the site to rank for that keyword, and when it first starts ranking for that keyword it will be in the very deep numbers. Then as you continue working, the rankings will get higher and higher, as that ranking number gets lower and lower and you get closer to the top.

If you only checked whether or not your site was ranking for a keyword down to the #20 position, you could be making progress but you’d never know it.

Does SEO and link building take a while? Sure. Getting great search engine rankings and resulting traffic is not for the impatient or the faint of heart. It’s a 6-12 month or longer program. But by using this system, you can see that progress is being made.

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SEO and Link Building

by John Eberhard

I recently was communicating to a client and realized he had a confusion between the terms "SEO" (search engine optimization) and "Link Building."

This prompted me to write an article recently with various definitions related to Internet marketing, which I thought was going to be dry and boring but I got several positive comments on the article.

I've decided there is a bit more to say about the relationship between these two internet marketing actions. Here are the definitions again:

SEO: Stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of selecting the best keywords, according to high traffic and low competition, and then placing these keywords in the appropriate places on the website. SEO is a one-time action, not something one tinkers with month by month. It should be redone every 2-3 years, as keyword traffic and competition can change significantly.

LinkBuilding: I have observed some people have glommed this activity into SEO and use the term SEO to refer to both SEO and link building. For the purposes of clarity I think it is best to keep them as separate terms. Link building is the action of creating links on other websites linking back to yours. Google states that the number of links to your site from other sites is its primary criteria for deciding the ranking of a site. So link building is a vital activity if you want your site to rank well on search engines and thus get increased traffic.

Some people get the idea that SEO is like some magic wand and all they have to do is get SEO done to their site and watch the traffic flood in. This is not correct. SEO is an action one does to a website that basically makes it possible for the site to rank well for the keywords that you select during the keyword research process.

But in order for the site to really rank well, you have to then do a program of link building. The ideal program is to do SEO, which is a one-time process, then do link building for at least 6-12 months. The best actions I have found for building links are:

1. Article Marketing: You write a 400-500 word article, then submit it to article directories. You include a "bio box" at the end of the article that includes brief info on you, your company and your website address. Each directory then counts as a link back to your site. Great for building quantity of links. Using this method I can build up links to thousands in just a few months.
2. Optimized Press Releases: Write press releases that contain some of your target keywords, and then submit them to online PR sites. Great for building quality links.
3. Blogs: Take both your articles and press releases and put them up on a blog, and take the keywords in the articles and releases and make them into a link pointing back to appropriate pages on your site.

Just as it is not as effective to just do SEO without doing link building, it is not as effective to do just link building without SEO. Why? Because one of the steps of SEO is to do research on keywords and select the best ones. Then you take those selected keywords and utilize them in your articles and press releases.

When doing a full program of SEO and link building, then each month I check the ranking of the website for all of the keywords I’m targeting. I use software called Market Samurai to do this, as it would take forever manually. Then I count up how many #1 keywords I have, how many in the top 10, top 20, top 100, and top 500. As you continue the link building program, you will see the number of your keywords in each of these categories go up month to month.

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