The Blogger SEO Burden

By Chris Crum

Drawbacks to Google's Blogging Platform

There is no question that blogging can help improve your search engine optimization efforts. Stephan Spencer, Founder & President Netconcepts talked about some of the reasons why in the following video, but he also said he favors some platforms over others for SEO purposes. Namely, he recommends WordPress or b2evolution as opposed to Google-owned Blogger.

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While Spencer may be right about Blogger not being as good for SEO purposes, it raises the question: Why would a blog platform owned by Google itself carry a greater burden for getting good rankings on the very search engine that everyone strives to rank well in? I contacted Spencer to get his thoughts on just that.

"I don't think it is intentional on Google's part," says Spencer. "The developers of Blogger designed it for simplicity and usability (the "KISS" principle). They 'didn't know what they didn't know' -- and that unfortunately included SEO."

"Believe it or not, the search engines are not expert at SEO," Spencer continued. "They are expert at search algorithms, which is a very different thing. In fact, several search engines hired us at various times to advise them on SEO, i.e. to help them get their own sites to rank better in Google! The engineers don't have the deep SEO experience that allows them to make SEO-informed decisions around functionality (like support for tag clouds), site architecture & internal linking structure (e.g. the way they handle pagination), design and layout, etc."

Spencer touched upon on a few of these things that Blogger lacks for SEO purposes in the above video. He also followed up with me:

BTW, this one takes the cake... the tag pages on Blogger (actually referred to as "labels" by Blogger) are disallowed by the robots.txt file! They are within the search directory, which is disallowed:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Doh!

Spencer also notes in the video, that "it's really hard to get off of it once you're on it," and there are many, many people using Blogger. Even if the platform isn't great for SEO purposes, there are still some things that you can do to help somewhat. People have offered SEO tips for Blogger in the past.

This article is about two and a half years old, but Wayne Hurlbert offers some in it. SEO Kolkata also had some suggestions about a year ago.

source : www.webpronews.com

SES Chicago: SEO Perks to Blogging

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We’ve talked many times about the advantages of blogging. One area that we haven’t touched on a lot however is the SEO benefits of blogging. In this video, Stephan Spencer discusses the SEO friendly blogging platforms and the non-SEO friendly blogging platforms.

First of all, Stephan debunks the theory that simply having a blog makes it search engine friendly. While there is a bit of truth to the theory, there are many other benefits that people are missing. For instance, PageRank isn’t always accurate and tag pages and tag clouds aren’t used to their full potential.

Stephan highly recommends WordPress as a blogging platform. The great thing about many of these blogging platforms including WordPress, is that a blog doesn’t have to look like a typical blog. WordPress can be used as a content management system (CMS) and is very search friendly. Stephan’s company site, Netconcepts.com, is a perfect example of this. If he hadn’t told us, no would ever know that the site was running as a WordPress blog.

Another blogging platform Stephan recommends is b2evolution. It brings SEO improvements that aren’t available in other blogging platforms. This platform is also free and runs on your own domain or website.

Lastly, Stephan does not recommend Blogger. His main arguments against it are its limitations. According to Stephan, Blogger users cannot set up 301 redirects and cannot incorporate tag clouds.

Now that you have a couple of recommendations to work with, go out there and utilize these blogging platforms!

source : www.webpronews.com

How to Use Video to Improve Google Ranking & Conversions

By Chris Crum

Good Video Content Will Give You a Competitive Edge

Online video is consuming the web as we know it whether you like it or not. Some prefer text content over video in most cases, and that's ok too. I don't think text is going anywhere, but demand for video is on the rise from both consumers, and businesses looking to stay on top of their marketing. Just like not all text is great, not all video is great, but when done well, I think you will find that it offers plenty of reward.

Content and Reputation

Bad videos are a turn off for viewers. They must have value. Otherwise they'll be viewed as a waste of time. If viewers see your videos as a waste of time, this is generally going to equate to wasted time on your part as well, and chances are that you put a whole lot more time into your videos than any viewer will. But even worse, if your videos are perceived as a waste of time by viewers, it's going to reflect negatively on your brand, or at the very least upon your ability to offer useful and informative content.

Remember, while the rise in online video popularity is certainly evident, many people would just as soon obtain the information they're looking for with text. In fact, this is a good reason to offer truly unique content with your videos. Developing a reputation for having solid unique content with them will give people a reason to watch them. The best videos provide a user experience that simply can't be duplicated in text.

Robert Scoble cited a good example in a recent post. "Text is easier to consume. Easier to search. All that stuff. But here, let’s try something. You take 1,000 words to explain to me what the next game from EA looks like. I’ll do it in a minute or two of video. The video will beat your blog every time," he declares.

Length is often a factor. As a rule, people generally do not want to watch lengthy videos unless they are either entertaining or truly useful to them. From a business standpoint, I believe you are going to have greater success with making the content as useful as possible in as little amount of time as possible.

Video Usability

Grantastic Designs Founder Grant Crowell writing for ReelSEO has a great article/podcast on web video usability. He discusses the need for video providers to have some kind of usability standards. In his article, Crowell talks about some factors that should be taken into consideration when providing video content:

- Location
- Features
- Testing

By location, he means, where it is being viewed. Is it being viewed on a website or in a stand-alone player? Is it on your own site or is it being viewed in an embedded player on someone else’s? Do you even offer the ability to embed your videos?

Apart from embedding availability, features of the video include things like the player itself, the navigation of that player, accessibility, search, image and audio quality, length, content, speed (buffering), conversions, and completion. Videos should also be tested. This means: lab testing, user testing, and analytics.

Engagement and Google

In Crowell's article, he also talks about the engagement factor of videos. Being how user-engagement is of growing importance (and will likely continue to be as SERPs evolve), I wanted to hear some more of his thoughts on this, so I contacted him and we had a little chat. Following is what came of that:

Chris Crum: You refer to engagement as an active state, and I agree, but what kind of actions do you expect videos to inspire? Comments? Conversions?

Grant Crowell: The actions ultimately depend on the business model of the video owner. But the potential with video is far greater at engagement and conversions than with static content. The first step is getting attention. After that it can serve as a direct response or lead, or buzz (going viral), or branding.

Even within the video, you can have several calls-to-action, all clickable and with additional actionable items from them. (See our latest video interview at ReelSEO on Mixpo, for more on this.

"Conversions" can be both mini and macro, depending again on what are the business objectives of the video owner. A comment could likely be a mini-conversion. A hundred comments and 3rd party link popularity and buzz, well that could be a macro-conversion.

CC: SEO Bruce Clay recently speculated that as SERPs evolve, videos might make a difference in ranking. For example if two competing businesses have content of basically equal value, but only one of them has video, the one with video might be favored. How important do you think it's going to be for businesses to offer some kind of video content on their sites?

GC: Video itself can be given an almost "unfair advantage" in the SERPs. We've demonstrated that at ReelSEO with how we're able to have our own image icons show up from our videos for search results -- directly from our ReelSEO.com site (not YouTube). I've even done a case study to show how [in] a video series I did on YouTube, the targeted keywords had my image icons show up higher that the entire local and regional media stories.

source : www.webpronews.com

Increase Website Profit Online with Online SEO and Marketing Content

By Peter Nisbet in SE Optimization
You can easily increase you website profit online if you have the right marketing content and use good online SEO to promote it. The benefit of good online search engine optimization is that it can earn you an avalanche of free traffic through high search engine listings, while at the same time pointing prospects to some good online content.
The question is what is that content, and what online SEO should you be using? The answer to the first part of that question is obvious: the content you use must relate to the topic of your web page, and each web page must be optimized for one keyword, and one keyword only. Where most people fail with their online marketing is that they try to be all things to all people, and are not specific enough in targeting prospects to the right website pages.
To increase web profit online, it is essential that your marketing content is highly focused to the topic or product in hand, and that your online SEO is spot on, missing none of the elementary aspects of SEO, while taking advantage of the more advanced search engine optimization techniques that the vast majority either ignore or are unaware of. You can’t do much about other people’s ignorance, but you can sure take advantage of it!
Doing so, however, might take some specialized information on online SEO techniques and how to apply them to your advantage. You will no doubt be aware of the simple Meta tag rules, and how to use heading tags in your body content, but how are you with internal linking strategies, or being able to lead spiders by the nose around your whole website exactly as you want them to visit each page? No? Then you have a lot to learn.
Intimate knowledge and understanding of search engine optimization techniques such as the correct use of the ‘nofollow’ and ‘noindex’ tags can be critical to your success. The same is true of an understanding of latent semantic analysis and how Google is applying it to the Bigdaddy algorithm. How about the correct use of images, video and Flash? Are you fully conversant of how Google looks upon these? Probably not, because it might surprise you to know that Flash is not what is used to be in the eyes of Google spiders, and that the vast majority still does not know how to properly use images to their maximum benefit.
Marketing content is also very important, and writing articles is an excellent way to generate content both for your web pages and to use on article directories to advertise them. You will sell nothing if your web pages get no visitors, and two of the best ways to achieve that are to get a good listing on search engines for your main keyword and to publish articles that contain an advert for the relevant web pages in the author’s resource.
Marketing content can also be in the form of well written and SEO optimized articles, and in order to increase web profit online you must have good search engine optimized marketing content. Without that you are dead in the water, because your web pages will never be listed on Google, which is the most important of the search engines.
So, focus on your online SEO and your marketing content and you will increase your web profit online as a result of that. It is not as simple as you might have been led to believe, but if you can find the right mentor then you should find it a fairly simple task as long as you have a reasonable product and know how to market it online.

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process or how to optimize websites or blogs that we have to be shown on the search engine is good search engine Google, Yahoo, and MSN, this process can also be used to increase traffic to the website / blog us. Website / blog that has a high rank will usually be placed on the first page of search results from search engines.

So SEO that lead us to put the website / blog at least we are in the first page of search results search engine. SEO is the process to create a website with relevant search engine. And all that can be achieved with 2 ways to do that is with the study of the keywords that we will use the website and a link to the website. With many traffik to come to a website indicates how important the website is on the search engines. Search engines will see that our website is quite important for the website, another website that links to me, that means the website will also ranked first in the list of search engines.

In a very fundamental SEO is the use of appropriate keywords in the website / blog and our website, which many refer to webste to us then that is great opportunity for us to receive a higher ranking for example, the Google page Rank. All this is how we use this technique, how to get ranked high. One thing to remember here is that if we want to put the website we have a good ranking in search engines using SEO techniques.

Still confused?, Is the principal SEO techniques to get high traffic to a website / blog using keyword-specific keywords. Keyword-keyword later that this will be the bait to attract the netter when they search through the search engine. And that all need proses.

The Final Day of Busby SEO Challenge

1 day next this busby seo challenge competition will ending, tomorrow we will know the champion, tomorrow we will know who has best ability in SEO.

Actually, contest like this can’t prove us as a SEO Master, because this is in short time, SEO master will made the website on top search enggine result in long time, they will make their website on top position everytime.

I know many technique to make top position on search enggine result with this busby seo challenge keyword. Some of them are quick and accurate, yes Buy link is simple quick and easy way to got million backlink instanly.

My idea.. the real winner is who that still on top position on next 4 or 5 month after this busby seo challenge finish. You knw why? yes because after this busby seo challenge end, all paid backlink and contributon backlink from supportter wil release. They will lose many backlink. So then we will know who real champion after that.

Don’t be anggry, i still believe who on top position on this busby seo challenge competition tommorow is the champion too. they can make best position in short time, they have good and best SEO skilled.

I still have time to try to make my busby seo challenge website on better position. Let’s see tommorow on busby seo challenge finish line.

Source : http://perth.rayofshadow.com/the-final-day-of-busby-seo-challenge/