Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Blogger Custom FTP or Blogspot Set Up?

Does it make a difference for search engines what your blog set up is at Blogger? No, it does not. I used to believe that only custom FTP blogging provided quality search engine results, but no longer.

I have just completed over four months of research and analysis on this topic and several others and have found that in some cases a Blogspot based blog will outperform a custom FTP blog. I have also found that if you have multiple services on your website, you may be better served if you are blogging mainly for search engines to have a Blogspot based blog on each individual topic. Great idea, but only if you have the time to blog or pay someone to blog on all of them.

It appears from our research that the topics you have much authoritative content will be able to piggyback on your domain if you are custom FTP blogging, but not by much. So if you want the new Blogger, love widgets, want a quick and easy set up, then regular Blogspot set up is perfect for you.

We are now only recommending custom FTP set up when you want a seamless template with your website, want your blog pages included in your local website search engine results or are blogging on a very narrow topic of services where you have much authoritative content back on your website.

You’ll be able to read the documentation soon, when we post our white paper title “The Tangible Benefits of Blogging.”

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A Nice Quick Launch Website

We’ve just done a nice little Quick Launch website for a client last week. Up in three days, this six page website using one of our Quick Launch templates was up in time for a charity event.

You can visit the site at www.sunsbeauties.org. Quick Launch is our special web design program that allows you to select from several premade templates. We can do some site customization and in this case were able to add some great images that communicated just what this new non-profit organization does.

Click our blog post title to take a look.

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Our September e-Newsletter is Out

We’ve published our September e-newsletter. Click our post title to read instructions on how to set up multiple email accounts and also what you should know about your privacy and Google Analytics.

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Google AdWords Landing Page Test

Sometimes a customer just simply wants to do a test to see if something will work before they go whole hog. Here is one case study for Pinnacle Executive Center you may find interesting.

This client leases virtual office space in the Bethesda and Rockville areas outside of Washington DC. Now by virtual I mean 100 to 300 square foot mini-offices. But these offices have a special twist, they are deluxe and have reception service, copy center, conference rooms, and even concierge services. That means get your errands and dry cleaning done for you while you are working.

The client did not want to invest in a full blown optimized website and had already purchased a nice online Flash brochure, plus they were testing a Google AdWords program to see if any or all of it would work to drive leases.

What we did was to do a mini site optimization for the Flash page, scroll to the bottom of the landing page linked into my blog post title and you will see what I mean. You can right click to view source and review the meta tags as well. I tried to create some keyword density for them on a Flash site that had no text as he was hoping to get some organic placement as well.

In addition we are using this same page as a Google AdWords landing page, looking for a good quality score based again on a mini-optimization. I’ll let you know how it performs over the next several weeks. It should be an interesting test!