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.
Posted on

Blogging for Search Engines

Many of the same techniques that you routinely use for good search engine optimization on your website should be used on your blog. Here are some of our top tips.

  • Make sure your blog post contains your top keywords but don’t spam
  • Keep your blog posts keyword dense and on one topic
  • Use the title link field to make your title clickable to point to an article or your website for more information
  • If you have a link in the content, make sure that you properly use keywords in the anchor text
  • For more boost try bolding your important keywords in your post or in your anchor text
  • Our typical blog post is about 200 to 350 words, don’t write a dissertation
  • Use labels if you can with your keywords in the label

There is no right or wrong way to write your blog, but there is a more effective way to get better search engine placement using your blog.

Posted on

Blogging for Search Engines

Many of the same techniques that you routinely use for good search engine optimization on your website should be used on your blog. Here are some of our top tips.

  • Make sure your blog post contains your top keywords but don’t spam
  • Keep your blog posts keyword dense and on one topic
  • Use the title link field to make your title clickable to point to an article or your website for more information
  • If you have a link in the content, make sure that you properly use keywords in the anchor text
  • For more boost try bolding your important keywords in your post or in your anchor text
  • Our typical blog post is about 200 to 350 words, don’t write a dissertation
  • Use labels if you can with your keywords in the label

There is no right or wrong way to write your blog, but there is a more effective way to get better search engine placement using your blog.

Posted on

Blogs and Copyright Issues

This is a good article to read from the Blog Herald. The article speaks about potential problems of copyright infringement when bloggers embed YouTube videos. But should you believe it?

My take on it is this. If you post your video on YouTube, you are wanting others to see and to share your video content otherwise you would not upload it. Same goes for Google Video. If you want to control your video then you simply do not load it onto Google Video or on YouTube. Very simple.

I find it hard to believe that a lawyer for a person who felt that their video had been infringed upon would contact and try to sue people who have posted a YouTube video uploaded by their client. The issue may exist in the a totally litigious minded group on the Ethernet, but in the real world come on!

I am a big stickler on copyright issues, but I think that this issue and the warning flags issued are not in the scope of real world use.

Posted on

Unique Sessions More Important Than Page Views

Many clients have thought that page views was a measure of success in website traffic, but with new technology in use like AJAX, page views are not considered a real measure of site popularity.

I have always monitored unique sessions as my benchmark for success on a site. Page views may be preferable for some as it is typically a higher number and so looks better, but in truth, sessions is a more accurate figure.

Yahoo News which is linked to our post title discusses how even Nielsen/NetRatings is changing how they monitor sites and dropping page views as their measure of site popularity and moving to unique sessions. This is in part due to the introduction of new Web technologies which have significantly skewed page view results.

Personally I think that it is about time. Utilizing page views as your key metric simply does not make sense. I like to watch unique sessions and then average time on a site or average number of pages per unique visitor. I feel that this gives a more rounded and accurate view of a site’s popularity.