SEO Best Practices: Setting Up a Blog

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JBloggs

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SEO Best Practices: Setting Up a Blog
Your blog should be the centerpiece of a larger initiative, one that engages your target audience in a "human" way, with the goal of creating signals that will aid/support what you're trying to achieve with SEO.
JB - Good article. It is about the meat and potatoes of subdomain vs subdirectory, wordpress vs blogger, etc.
 
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067370/Why-Blog-The-Benefits-of-Business-Blogging-for-Visitors-Links
JB - - There is nothing here that we don't say everyday on this forum. People shake their heads and act like we're nuts, we are innkeepers not social media marketers! Yes we are both!
Excerpt:
Blogging for Visitors
When blogs first hit the web in a real way they were a central mechanism for informing and communicating with one's website visitors and customers. Businesses would blog their specials, new product updates, industry news, holidays and pretty much everything that had to do with their business.
For businesses that have moved their core communications off of blogs and onto social media, you're missing huge opportunities.
When we're considering visitors the first thing we need to do is separate the purpose and expectations a user will have when visiting a blog. Because of social media, a blog is a place one goes for in-depth information and not to see the daily special. Understanding the expecting change a visitor will have forces us down a path beneficial for both users and our analytics.
Current Visitors
When you're blogging for your current visitors (i.e., visitors that entered outside your blog or who know you already and simply use your blog as an information source) the key is no longer to post daily updates on daily deals or the such, that's the stuff of social media.
[h3]
For this group, your blog is your opportunity to reinforce that you know what you're talking about and can be trusted. You can go outside your core niche but stay in related fields.[/h3]
For example, if you run a food tour company, blogging about great restaurant openings with reviews or even some outstanding recipes would be wins. Keeping visitors updated on weather changes is the stuff of social media or a weather widget embedded on your site.
Your blog is where you build authority. You'll convert elsewhere on your site; your blog is where you reinforce the credibility that will turn into conversion.
New Visitors
Personally, one of my biggest focuses when thinking up blog topics is how it can be used to acquire new visitors. Because a blog post is on your domain, it can be used to drive traffic to more conversion oriented pages and best of all, if done right, you'll have established trust before they move on.
Let's take as our example the same food tour site noted above. Now let's say I'm a traveler visiting a city for the first time and decide to look up “best fine dining in New City” and find a blog review on a new fine dining restaurant.
Regardless of whether the review was positive or negative, you've got a visitor to your site who you know has money, you know likes good food, and who now appreciates your opinion. If the review isn't positive you may want to make a couple of recommendations to fine dining restaurants in the city people would enjoy.
This also applies to any product, service, analysis, etc. you may post about. The win here is that you have a visitor in your target demographic and interest set and they are relying on your opinion.
Essentially, blogs, done right, can be excellent sources of search traffic (and traffic from other sources of course) and if you've posted on topic, that traffic will be targeted properly.
You'll likely find that your blog traffic converts at a lower rate than the traffic for phrases more targeted to their needs (for example “food tours new city”) and blogging is time consuming so you may be asking, “Why would I do that?” Apart from this additional traffic there is one key SEO benefit…
read the rest on the link above
 
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This article gives the light in which we can observe the reality. This is very nice one and gives in depth information.
 
SEO practices are the ones, with the help of which one can increase rankings of the site and with the help of this, a website gets placed in the top rankings.
SEO companies
 
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