Category: Blogs

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How Many Blog Posts Should You Show on Your Front Page?

Yes that is right Nancy McCord is still in Russia. This is one of her previously published articles. She is back on August 16.

This is an interesting topic for blog owners and I have changed my own mind on this point over the years.

It used to be with most of our client blogs on Blogger, we set the blog to show 30 posts on the home page. Now with most of our clients using WordPress and many more home page options, we recommend having five blog posts on your home page.

I have seen some blogs where they just show one blog post on the home page or some that show three, but I personally like showing five blog posts.

If you have WordPress, you can even select to have a static page for the entry page of your blog and I have even seen some blogs where they simply show categories and snippets of posts like a magazine portal page. There are many flavors of what you should use for your home page.

Darren at ProBlogger did a review of this topic and I thought that the comments written in by other bloggers were very good. Here is the vote on the number in a nutshell.

Two Posts 1 Blogger

Three Posts 4 Bloggers

Four Posts 3 Bloggers

Five Posts 13 Bloggers

Six Posts 3 Bloggers

Seven Posts 1 Blogger

Ten Posts 6 Bloggers

More Than 10 Posts 2 Bloggers (1 had snippets the other had 35 posts)

So the consensus seems to match my thoughts five blog posts on the home page seems about right.

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Building Web Authority with Blogging

Nancy McCord is in Russia this week and next. This article is reprinted from her published archive.

Web authority is valuable for any business which wants to position themselves as an authority in their field. Building web authority can not only be good for establishing yourself in your clients’ and prospects’ eyes as their resident expert and “go-to” resource, but can be hugely beneficial for improving organic search engine placement.

Web authority is gained on the web from quality content, depth of content on a topic, age of your website, number of pages your website contains, and number of links from outside sources pointing to the content. Web authority is certainly not gained overnight, but many things can be done to your website which will help to immediately create an authority factor.

One of the best ways to build web authority is to blog on your selected business topic. If you don’t want to blog, hire a professional to blog for you, but BLOG! Blogging builds content for your website fast and if the content is good can help to immediately start you on the path to building your authority on a specific topic or narrow range of topics. You’ll get the fastest and best results if you start out blogging five days week, but at the minimum of at least three days a week. If your budget won’t allow you to hire a blog writer indefinitely for blog post five days a week, invest in two months worth of blogging and then cut back to three days a week at the end of two months.

Blogging adds content easily to your website and search engines consider each blog post as if it were a single and new HTML page addition to your website when your blog is filed on your web hosting server under your domain name.

If web authority is important to you stay away from off-site blogging. Use WordPress and have it installed on your own web hosting account using your own domain name in your blog. You can’t get any web authority benefits when you blog at Blogspot or at Typepad for your website.

In our next few post we’ll discuss other opportunities for building authority such as feature articles for syndication and white papers so make sure to come back tomorrow for more information on building your own web authority.

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Blogging Your Way to Better Organic Placement

Although it is hard to quantify if blogging will help your website place better organically, I have to say that from reviewing four different clients in the same industry, blogging can definitely make a difference.

Here is one concrete example, we have four clients in the same state, three of which are located in the same general service area. Three blog, one does not. Monthly I review site placement and prepare placement reports for several of these clients.

One site we have been blogging for since 2006 has garnered top Google placement on many keywords, another site that we designed but just started blogging for is moving up in placement. One site we did not design, but blog for is now placing organically on terms it had not placed on before., and the other fourth site we designed, but is not blogging, placed well initially but now after three month is starting to drop in the search results. Of specific interest is the site for which we did not do the design for is now placing organically, but on the blog posts not the website pages.

From this I can unequivocally say that blogging does help your organic placement. When blogging is teamed with great SEO web design, you can definitely move up in the organic results. Additionally, we have found that when we blog heavily on specific phrases for over 30 days at a time, we can additionally garner placement on these terms. This is particularly important on location or geographic specific terms.

One big note however is to remember that the results you can receive are all based on on-domain blogging versus off-domain blogging. Blogging can be an excellent way to position your website organically, just do it the smart way.