Category: Blogs

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Helping Your Blog Writer Do A Better Job

Blogging is a core business for my firm, McCord Web Services. I have found that website owners that take a little bit of time to help our writer get their footing, help us to do a better job delivering what they need for organic search placement and development of web authority.

Here are a few tips to help your blog writer when you start blogging.

  • Make sure to let your writer know your audience – age, gender, typical demographics.
  • Supply a short list of about ten keyword phrases that you think people will use to find you.
  • Offer a short selection of links of blog sites that you like for style and content.
  • Let them know which two or three blogs you read in your own industry.
  • Be patient, it will typically take four to eight blog posts for the writer to hit a stride in writing for you.
  • Make sure to read your own blog and help the writer to understand what you like so that they can do more of that particular topic or style of blog post.
  • As you browse the web send them links of content that you think would make a great background for a blog post. This actually helps them to know what you like.

The more initial interaction you have with your blog writer the better and more effective the blog posts will be for your personal business needs. That doesn’t mean that you need to do these steps beyond the initial break in period, but for the first week to two weeks your input will be hugely helpful and will shape the future of your blog post content.

If you are looking for quality blog writers for your own blog, I invite you to review our services.

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Using HubSubHubBub to Tag Your Content for Google

Writters Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content
Writers Need to Follow These Important Steps to Tag Their Content

On Monday I spoke a little about HubSubHubBub which Google recommends as a way to push out to the Web and tag your unique content to protect your AuthorRank for organic placement. In this post I want to dive a little deeper into this topic to help you understand how using these tools can help you with organic placement.First, I recommend that if you are a blogger that you set up your feed to be delivered by Feedburner which is a Google property. It is easy to set up and account and migrate your blog feed to Feedburner. You’ll end up with a feed that looks like this: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheWebAuthority instead of a WordPress generated feed that would look like http://www.mccordweb.com/weblogs/feed.xml. Make sure to select in the publicize tab to connect your feed to PingShot so you are pushing your content out.

Second, use the FD Feedburner Plugin for WordPress to override all settings in your blog platform to point to your new Feedburner RSS feed. It is simple to do once you have your Feedburner account set up.

Third, set up an account at FriendFeed. This is a fairly old application but one that I like and with the ability to push content to it now with Feedburner it operates as a hub for HubSubHubBub which will tag your content. At Feedburner make sure to link not your blog URL, but rather to link your Feedburner feed URL. This action completes the process to tie everything neatly together.

Here’s a great article I found that taught me how to take these steps for my own blog as part of my research for this post. I’d like to thank Jorge Escobar for his excellent article and tips. You can also watch this video about HubSubHubBub to understand why using these protocols are now best practices for any blog and writer.

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Google’s Matt Cutts on Guest Blogging and Link Building Clarification

Google’s spam engineer Matt Cutts takes time in this video to clarify further how Google feels about guest blogging and answers if you use guest blog posts will your website be penalized for placement. This is an excellent video and well worth the minute or two to watch.

Here is the synopsis of the video in a nutshell.

1. If you allow just anyone without review to post to your blog or you accept blog posts that have been posted widely on the Web already, your own site’s reputation can be impugned by this tactic and placement may drop based on Google’s new filters.

2. If you are allowing articles that have been spun (meaning multiple versions created automatically with software changing the word order in an effort to provide seemingly “unique” content for each site you send to) to be used on your website or blog, you will most likely have your site penalized in Google for these activities.

3. Matt says point blank that if you are doing many guest blog posts or allowing many guest blog posts that may be of questionable syndication on your own website, that this is a “pretty good indicator of bad quality”. “If your website links to or receives links from sites like this, this can lower your own site’s reputation.” “Yes, Google is willing to take action against sites that are doing low quality or spammy guest blogging.”

My recommendation to you is that if you accept guest blog pieces, they should be written uniquely for your website. I would recommend you use a service like Copyscape Premium to test if a piece sent to you is unique. I would not post articles that appear in many locations on your own website. Better yet get your own blog writer. I invite you to review our blog writing service program.

If you do guest blog posts for others sites, I would be very selective of the sites you choose to write for and consider limiting your content to only one or two really high quality sites. Make the inbound links to your website be meaningful and not hurtful to your overall placement strategy.

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Guest Blogging for Links

What does Google (Matt Cutts) think about guest blogging and the links that are generated from doing it? This excellent video answers the question.

This is the bottom line. If you did not sweat in creating the guest blog post Google will typically not give you link juice for it. That’s the hard cold fact. Write a light weight blog post of about 250 words, post it on a variety of sites, and maybe even use article spinning software in an effort to create unique content for each site and you really will not be getting link benefits.

Create a well written, informative, insightful blog post for a site that supports your industry and yes Google does like this approach. It’s all about the time you take and the insight you provide. Do not do guest blogging just for links with minimal effort on your part Matt and Google pretty much say in this video that it is wasted effort.