Web Tips: How to optimize your blog in minutes
While writing blogs is a great way to build credibility and interest in your business, they can be very time consuming. The last thing you need is to spend lots of extra time performing search engine optimization (SEO) on the blog to improve its ranking.
Fortunately there’s an amazing, free plugin that amps up your SEO efforts. You can add it to your WordPress blog, it’s incredibly effective and only takes minutes to use.
By using this plugin (and a lot of focused writing) I got my industrial marketing blog on page one of Google for my key search phrase “industrial marketing consultants” in less than 90 days from a dead start. In addition this plugin automatically updates my sitemaps and contacts Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask as soon as I publish a new blog. I often see my new blogs indexed by Google less than 10 minutes after they’re published. Best of all, the plugin only takes about 15 minutes to configure.
The WordPress SEO Plugin (click here) is free http://yoast.com although you can make a donation to the creator.
It’s easy to use. When you write a blog there are spaces for your focus keyword, page title, page description, and (if you so choose) keywords, then shows you if your focus keyword shows up in your article heading, page title, page URL, content, and description. It also performs a full analysis of your blog and tells you what needs to be done to improve your on-page SEO.
I give this plugin my highest recommendation. It takes a lot of the complexity out of SEO and, most importantly, it works.
And now for a few observations about comments and why I turned mine off.
Spam bots are getting better at finding blogs and sending them huge quantities of comment spam.
When I recently returned from a 10-day holiday, there were more than 500 comments on my industrial blog, 495 of them spam. It took about 30 minutes to sort them.
My spam filter works well but I still have to moderate many of the comments. As my blog rises through the search engine rankings the deluge of spam gets worse.
I have (somewhat reluctantly) turned off comments to spend more time writing posts and less time sorting spam.
Are comments valuable? Yes. Should you allow comments on your blog? Yes, as long as you are willing to devote time to moderating the spam.
Andrew Shedden is the president of Broadfield Consulting, a marketing consulting firm that makes it easier for companies to grow their revenues. For new media resources and services visit http://www.broadfieldcommunications.com. For free industrial marketing resources visit http://broadfieldconsulting.com.
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Web Tips: How to optimize your blog in minutes
