Just Jace: A Blog About Blogging

What makes some blogs better than others? How important are subscribers, Google PageRank, and Technorati score? Jim Kukral and Paul Richlovsky of http://www.fathomseo.com talk about what really makes a good blog.

Popularity: 12% [?]

John from http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/ gives us another excellent tip today, be sure and check out their seo workshops and if you have the chance be sure and attend one!

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI for short, is an extremely powerful influence to relevancy.

Just remember that it does not ever replace good basic optimization factors, but it is something that you can study and apply to specific pages for those occasions where you have very low KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) phrases, that are highly competitive.

LSI is an influence that is at work in the background rewarding you for writing higher quality, (well written) content.

When you hear Matt Cutts from Google talking about writing better quality content, he is not offering deep hidden meaning in his advice. There are EXCELLENT reasons to right higher quality content that reads well to your visitors.

Best advice is to create content that is useful, reads well and that serves some legitimate purpose.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Blogging For SEO: How To Get Maximum Search Benefit From Your Small Business Blog

If you have a small business blog, or are thinking of starting one, you should be aware of the ways you can use your blog to drive traffic to your Website. It’s simpler than you think.

The first thing to understand about your blog is that each entry is counted as one Web page. Even if you have your blog set to display 10 blog posts on the same page, each of them is counted as a separate Web page by the search engines. That’s why it is important to treat each blog entry as an SEO tool. The following tips should be kept in mind for each blog entry in order to optimize them for the search engines and drive more traffic to your Website from your blog:

1. Optimize each blog post around a single keyword
2. Make sure your keyword is in your blog post title, preferably at the beginning
3. Use subheads with or tags that also use your keyword
4. Include 1-3 keyword links (anchor text) in your blog posts
5. Sign every blog post with a signature link that uses your keyword
6. Use bold and italics effectively to emphasize certain keywords and phrases
7. Be sure to ping the directories
8. Include tags for all of your blog entries
9. Use categories effectively
10. Make links appear natural by linking to internal pages of your Website

Because each blog entry is a separate Web page, the search engines will crawl them and index them just as they do your Web pages. Optimize each one heavily around a specific keyword related to your Website and that’s an extra doorway into your Website for each page indexed at the search engines. Also, by adding anchor text to a couple of those keywords and pointing those links to relevant internal Web pages of your Website you are improving the SEO effect of your blog entry. A poll of top SEO experts by SEOmoz revealed that a majority of those SEO experts said these type of keyword links are among the top 10 most important SEO factors for ranking Web pages. Don’t give up on keywords and anchor text.

You’ll also want to include keyword tags with each blog entry. Those tags will be used by the search engines to index your pages appropriately for your keywords. Also, social bookmarkers will find it easier to tag your blog entry if they like it and this makes it easier to share among their social group.

Your blog category should indicate an important element of interest as well. Unlike tags, you should only choose one category for each blog post. Don’t use “main” or “uncategorized.” Those are too generic. Use a specific keyword-related category as that will make your blog posts more crawlable by the search engines.

There are more than 100 blog directories that you can ping to let them know you have updated your blog. I suggest you do this every time you update your blog. With WordPress, and several other blogging software platforms, you can input each directory into a field and the software will send out an automatic ping each time you update your blog. If you are not using WordPress you should go to Ping-o-Matic and use it to ping your blog for free.

Finally, if you sign your blog posts with a keyword-rich signature that points to a relevant internal page of your Website, this will make your Website more crawlable and give you another anchor text link. Use something like, “Find Out More About Keyword.” Then add another link that points to your home page.

The important thing to remember about keywords and links, whether on your blog or your Website, is to make them appear natural. The benefits are enormous.

Popularity: 13% [?]

If you are in the midst of creating a new article or content for your Web site, remember that time is your friend. Don’t be in a rush but take your time to release your finished work over at least 48 hours or longer.

Our thoughts creatively continue as the old expression suggests…as we “sleep on it.” This applies especially to creative writing or even just copywriting in general. Try working on two or three different projects at a time and over a period of a few days.

Don’t be in a big rush to finish something off quickly. But give yourself the liberty to be creative over a  period of time. Fashion your articles as you assemble your thoughts onto paper. Writing is something that flows with practice. Great articles are often born as you take the time you need to write them.

Thanks to John From Search Engine Workshops for this great tip

Popularity: 10% [?]

Thanks to ProBlogger.net for the poll, the answers are very surprising.

Popularity: 4% [?]