Blog Post Optiimization

As blogging has increasingly become a more important aspect of a writer's life, whether we're promoting or disseminating information, I thought I'd share the following hint from Karen Cioffi.~Till next time. Helen


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Blog Post Optimization – 4 Tips By Karen Cioffi In a screen-sharing webinar for Writers on the Move, the topic was creating an optimized post on Blogger. Much of the information was relevant to posting to WordPress and other hosting sites. When presenting webinars without the help of a moderator, you can sometimes miss questions – it’s tough to present and keep track of the chat box at the same time. Reviewing the replay, I noticed I missed two questions, so there answered here. I’ll also include a couple of questions that I did answer during the webinar. 1. Where do you get the links to use for anchor text and deep linking in your posts? You create your own lists of article titles and their links either in a Word or Excel document. I have a number of different lists: one contains posts from this site; one has posts from Writers on the Move, another is made up of articles from other sites. I also have separate lists within those categories for writing and marketing. This makes finding and using relevant article links easier and quick. 2. Do you need permission to link to someone else’s site? No, you don’t. Linking to other sites is recommended for a couple of reasons: a. It offers your reader a broader reading experience. b. It brings traffic to the site you’re linking to. c. You get more search engine juice from the article when you link to quality sites that are relevant to your content. 3. What’s the etiquette on responding to comments on your post? It’s important to respond to every comment your post gets, if at all possible. This is the effective marketing thing to do. The visitor/commenter should feel that you took the time to read his comment and that you value his visit enough to respond. It would be as if you had a guest to your home - you certainly wouldn’t ignore him. In some cases this isn’t always possible, such as in the case of sites that get a tremendous amount of comments. Comments, along with your responses, is part of blogging optimization. All your online activity is picked up by the search engines. 4. How many anchor text and deep links should you use? If you’re hyperlinking text within your content, two should be sufficient. If you’re adding a “Read More” section at the end of the article, three to five links is a good amount. Most sites use the ‘read more’ or ‘you might be interested in this also’ sections, rather than using anchor text within the content of the article. This format makes the post cleaner and easier for the reader to find and use the hyperlinks to additional information. Definitions: Anchor text - text within your blog post that you're linking to a webpage (yours or another website). Deep linking - this is also called 'internal linking' and it's linking to other blog posts or webpages on your site. The first two links in the section below, More on Online Marketing, is an example of deep linking. TO COMMENT, please go to: http://www.karencioffiwritingandmarketing.com/2013/02/article-marketing-blog-posting.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I hope you found this information interesting and helpful. Too advanced, not enough, just right? I’d really love to know, so please leave a comment – good or bad or email me at: karencioffi@ymail.com P.S. If you liked this article, PLEASE SHARE IT BELOW!

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