ForestView: Blog Creation Guide 2013

BLOG CREATION GUIDE

A guide to create and moderate an optimized blog for your site.

CONTENTS

• Blog SEO Benefits

• The COLT approach

- Content Guidelines

- Optimization Guidelines

- Linking Guidelines

- Time Guidelines

• Incites more crawling – the more you publish the more your site gets crawled

• Attracts links – providing you are promoting the content

• Generated social media signals

• Drives more organic traffic

BLOG SEO BENEFITS

• Content

Your website needs good, worth reading & worth linking content!

• Optimization

Your website must be Search Engine and User-friendly!

• Links

Your website must be well integrated into a network of links

(naturally built!)

• Time

A good ranking takes time. Google’s trust and thus rankings

increase with time!

THE COLT APPROACH

CONTENT GUIDELINES

Optimize your TITLES for SEO

The Title, the contents of your page’s <title> tag, is one of the single most important factors for ranking in the search results.

• Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywordsare near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.

• People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

Variable settings for TITLES on dynamic pages

Categories, Tags and other taxonomies: %%term_title%% Archives %%page%% &#8226; %%sitename%%

Search pages: You searched for %%searchphrase%% &#8226; %%sitename%%

404 pages:Page not found – Error 404 &#8226; %%sitename%%

Author archives:%%name%% &#8226; %%cf_role*%% at %%sitename%%

In case of WordPress these settings can be applied within the WordPress SEO plugin here you can use %%cf_<custom field name>%% to use a custom field, this can be either a post custom field, sometimes known as post meta value, or a user meta value.

In this example the field “role” refers to author’s role within his company.

Create useful content

And link that content to your best internal pages:

It is better to add links on your best ranking posts rather than adding links to all pages/posts.

Optimize for mobile

Google advises to use responsive design for your site/blog

Use Pagespeed Insights to measure your site performance

on mobile and desktop devices:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Keywords Usage

Make sure that your most important keywords appear at the following locations:

In the page title

In the headlines

The page content

In file or directory names

In link texts

In the meta-information

Think about Questions not just keywords

• Think about the way people search

• Use your post title to answer questions in full

• Use keywords but worry less about keyword

placement than usefulness

• Do apply the ‘inverted pyramid’ model (see next)

The ‘inverted pyramid’ model

For a detailed guide of the Inverted Pyramid:- https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/735/04/- http://www.apstylebook.com/

Add author tags and other social elements to content

• Link your posts to your Google+ profile using rel=“author” tags

• Add your website to your Google+ account

Example from 1st result page ofGoogle for the key-phrase:“best android phone”

OPTIMIZATIONGUIDELINES

Domain name

• Choose a domain name that best represents your thematic area

• If the domain name consists of several words, among which is an important keyword, you should separate the words with hyphens: ie.

good: www.casino-games.gr not so good: www.casinogames.gr

• The same rule should be applied on posts URLs. In case of a WordPress blog is better to use the ‘Post name’ option instead of the Default one.

ie: Settings > Permalinks > Post name

This will create the desired URL structure: blog.gr/casino-games/

• Subdomain or subdirectory. It is advised for the blog to be inside a subdirectory instead of the subdomain. i.e. sportingbet.gr/blog/post-name/

File names

• Enter a meaningful name for each web page.

ie. Good: casino.html Bad: casino123.html or cas.html

You will need to manuallyedit the post’s URL so thatit will include your selectedkeywords in full.

• Media elements such as images, videos and more, are a fantastic opportunityto insert your keywords.

Source Optimization

• “Clean” your pages and remove unnecessary code.

• Draw out your content with logical HTML. Do not use headlines simply to increase font size but use it in the appropriate HTML elements (h1-h6). The same applies to paragraphs (p), lists (ul, ol, li) and highlighted text (em, strong).

• Move ALL formatting elements with CSS into external files. This is included in the head section as follows: <link rel=“stylesheet” type=“text/css” href=“mainstyles.css”>

• Do the same for JavaScript files. Also included in the head section as follows:src=“mainscript.js” <script type=“text/javascript”> </ script>

• Remove all unnecessary spaces from your code. Some programs for creating web pages, automatically create indentations that can increase page volume by up to 50%

• Try to be validated by W3C

Graphics Optimization

• Hide any text, especially any important terms in graphics. Search Engines can only read text.

• Give each image a descriptive file name. Bad: building05.jpg Good: acropolis.jpg

• Give each image a descriptive alternative text to describe their content in context. The alt-text is important not only for visitors who have disabled the loading of images, but is analyzed by Search Engines too, such as Google.

ie Wrong: <img src=“acropolis.jpg”>Correct: <img src=“acropolis.jpg” alt=“acropolis”>Clever: <img src=“acropolis.jpg” alt=“Athens's Acropolis views”>Spam: <img src=“acropolis.jpg” alt=“Athens hotel room with balcony view to Acropolis”>

• The presentation, dimensions and file size of graphics should also be optimized for smartphones.Keep in mind that mobile devices have a small display and slower Internet connection.

Navigation Optimization

• Use text links, and never forget the alternative text (alt attribute).

• Never use JavaScript, Java, Flash or image maps for navigation.

• Produce hover effects by using CSS rather than graphics and JavaScript.

• A breadcrumb navigation helps the user to immediately see the hierarchy level he is in and also assists on SEO rankings.

• A left-side navigation bar (specially if it is 20 pages or more) will “push” the main content area far below and thus make it less relevant for the Search Engines. In this case it is useful to apply a CSS-based “table trick” to navigate the code behind the main content:

Example Layout

[…….header………][nav][..content..]

[….footer.…]

Example Desired Source Code

<div id=“header”></div><div id=“content”></div><div id=“nav”></div><div id=“footer”></div>

LINKINGGUIDELINES

Link Popularity

• The more often your site is linked from other websites, the better. By inboundLinks you get a number of visitors who follow these links directly, and secondlyyou improve your search engines rankings.

• Link your blog/posts to other sites which might be interesting for your visitors.Outgoing (outbound) links can also improve your search engine rankings especiallyif they link to websites relevant to your content theme.(caution: no more than 20 external links)

• Have your friends, acquaintances and business partners link to your blog/posts.

• Links from link farms can have a negative impact on your search engine ranking(“bad neighborhood”). A link farm is characterized in that the ratio of links to text is very small.

Share Widgets

Giving your visitors the opportunity to share your content/blog posts is very importantfor final rankings. When a visitor shares your posts to his social media profiles he generatesan organic (not paid) link which leads back to your site.

Google not only is able to “read” these links but it also values them more because itunderstands that they are not paid links and thus they must be relevant.

Visit addthis.com to download a shareWidget that suits your template:

Citation strategies

When looking at the Local Search Ranking Factors, citation are one of the most important factors for the businesses to rank and be found online. Citations are an alternative to the “traditional” link building guides and as such are valued by Google similar to links.

Example of citation opportunities:

• Sponsorship Citations

• Event Citations

• Social Citations

• Job Citations

• Creative Citations

• Discount Citations

TIMEGUIDELINES

Effective use of Time

The process of Indexing and Ranking on the Search Engines can take up to 6 months for asite that regularly updates its content. It is very important to use this time in order toimprove your Blog in order to offer a better User Experience. By reducing elements such asthe Bounce Rate ratio or Pages per Visit you will also increase your overall traffic and thusyour rankings.

Some Key Questions for the first months:

• How relevant is the theme for your blog?

• How often is linked from other websites / blog?

• Are the competitor’s sites/blogs also optimized?

• What is the topic relevancy for your competition?