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Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Which Name To Use On Blog Comments

December 16th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

When you comment on other blogs, you have a choice to make as to which name you want to be known as. Normally you want the links to be directed at your own website or blog. Some people enter no link all. Those people have no interest in building links back to their sites.

For all the others, most use their real name or an alias. Using your real name is good if you are building brand awareness for it. Otherwise, here is a tip to generate more brand awareness for your website.

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Should WordPress Link Titles Be Long or Short for SEO?

December 14th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

When building your WordPress blog, eventually you will want the search engines to put you closer to the top of their results list for certain keywords. To get up there further, there are some things you can do on your blog.

One of my friends is building multiple sites using WordPress and asked me how long the navigation button titles should be. I thought the answer might help others too, so here is that conversation.

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Introduction to Sitemaps

January 10th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

While building your website, making all of the pages visible is more than just putting it online. You have to link to it so that you and your visitors can find it. creating a new web page and putting it online is just the beginning. Following these examples to notify the search engines about your new page, will get it noticed faster.

When you want all the pages that are meant to be public indexed by the search engines, there are 4 methods of making them available:

Internal Linking to each page from your home page, navigation menu and/or a sitemap.html page
Creating a sitemap.txt file and putting it in your home folder
Using the Google Sitemap plugin for WordPress, which creates the sitemap for you
External Linking: Those links from other websites to the specific pages

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Sub-Domains and Search Engines

November 30th, 2008 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

In June, 2007 I added a WordPress blog to my marketing site using a sub-domain (learn.affref.com) instead of putting it in a folder (affref.com/learn). My reasoning was that it would be easier to organize the site and link to. Instead of “www dot affref dot com forward slash learn” I could just say “learn dot affref dot com”.

Ever since then, I have added keyword-rich articles to the site and have driven visitors to it from multiple sources. Looking at the logs, most of the visitors came from the main site, not the search engines.

When checking the search engines, Google in particular, for the keywords used in the blog, Google always points to my home page instead of the blog itself. I have seen other site get their sub-domains listed in Google, but those are very high traffic sites, such as pcmag.com and others.

Over a year has passed without getting the listing. I know something should have been done sooner, but I was busy promoting it. So I finally did something about it and made another choice: I put the blog on its own domain.

Yes, I could have used the folder method and kept everything on one site, but the shorter name does not include the keywords I am promoting. Now the blog domain has the full site name in it, AffiliateReferralSources.com

See, affref.com was initially started for creating shorter affiliate links, but evolved into marketing tips. The problem is spelling the name on the phone or in person. “A, F as in Frank, F as in Frank, R E F as in Frank dot com” is a real hassle.

Now to lead someone to the blog I can just say the name. The main site is getting some good traffic, so I left it there and will continue using it until all the contents are merged into the new site. Then the shorter name will be used for its initial purpose: not only creating short links, but also have the ability to manage them.

Ok, so you are probably wondering why this blog is still on a sub-domain, right? I can think of only 2 reasons right now: Moving it is not an easy task and besides, I like it there. Search engines are only part of the traffic generating equation. If Google does not like the way this one is structured, then fine, others will.

I learned some valuable lessons here:
1) Use a domain name that means something and is easy to say.
2) Use a folder for the add-on blog instead of a sub-domain.
3) If something is not working after a few months of honest effort, do something about it!
4) The easiest route is not always the best route to take.

I hope this helps others who are asking themselves which way to set up their site. What are your thoughts on this?