How to establish and populate a WordPress blog that improves your Google ranking, establishes you as an expert, and opens up PR and social media opportunities. Presentation delivered at The British Library on 12th February 2015.
3. Contents
• The power of being an expert
• The best blogging platform
• The length of the perfect blog post
• Google and blogs
• Finding inspiration
• Social media and blogging
• Q&A
10. Why does length matter?
• There is no difference in the amount of search traffic
generated by longer or shorter posts. (Tomasz Tunguz)
• Blog posts with more than 1,800 words receive the most
links from other websites (Moz)
• The ideal blog piece takes 7 minutes to read – that’s
between 1,000 and 1,600 words long, depending on use of
imagery (Buffer)
• If a blog post is greater than 1,500 words, on average it
receives 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes
(Quick Sprout)
12. Why Google loves blogs
• Strong preference to give the best positions
within search results to websites that
continually add new content
• Shows that your website is fresh, current and
up-to-date.
• Google wants to rank sites that provide good
information – a helpful blog meets this
requirement.
13. Websites with blogs …
Receive 55% more traffic than static websites.
They also get:
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more indexed pages
(Stats from Hubspot)
14. Also …
• Adding between 21 and 51 blog posts to your
site boosts traffic by up to 30%
• Adding at least 52 blog posts boosts traffic by
77%.
(Stats from TrafficGenerationCafe)
16. PageRank
Google's rise to success was in large part due to
a patented algorithm called PageRank that helps
rank web pages that match a given search string.
When Google was a Stanford research project, it
was nicknamed BackRub because the
technology checks backlinks to determine a
site's importance.
17. Enter SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of
affecting the visibility of a website in a search
engine's "natural" or un-paid search results.
19. But why?
Because for many years,
the Google algorithm was
easy to cheat – any
rubbish website could
position itself at the top
of the search listings
(a.k.a. “SERPs”) with
cheap tricks, known as
Black Hat SEO.
.
20. Black hat SEO: Easy as 1,2,3
1. Create lots of content
2. Stuff it full of keywords
3. Buy thousands of links
23. Panda: 2011
• Targeted sites with low
quality and/or duplicate
content
• Up to 12% of search
queries affected
24. Penguin: 2012
• Targeted sites engaging
in link spam
• Around 2.3% of search
queries affected
• Designed to build upon
the work done by
Panda, and list more
high quality sites at the
top of the SERPs
25. Hummingbird: 2013
• Heralded the age of
semantic search
• Analysed search queries
as a collective whole
rather than a string of
individual words with
the aim of
understanding user
intent
26. The dawn of semantic search
• Semantics: the study of meaning.
• Google is trying to become more
sophisticated. It wants to go beyond the
words and phrases people use, to figure out
what they mean.
• We’ve got to do more than pepper
our blog content with keywords.
27. Changing user habits
• 20% of all searches in 2012 were new (Wired)
• Between November 2012-13, traffic to
websites from an ‘organic search’ decreased
by 5%, whilst traffic from ‘social referrals’
significantly increased by 111% (Shareaholic)
• Today, 96% of consumers’ time online
is spent on content sites (Wired)
28. Keywords: not dead yet
“Here’s the deal. Google can’t function without
keywords … they’re simply the words people
type in when they use search engines. It’s the
language real people use when looking for
stuff.”
Brian Clark, Founder of Copyblogger
31. Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam,
Google
“Make sure you make a great site, that users love,
that they’ll want to tell their friends about,
bookmark, come back to, visit over and over again;
all the things that make a site compelling. If that’s
your goal, we’re aligned with that goal, and
therefore as long as you’re working hard for users
we’re working hard to show your high
quality content to users as well.”
42. Writing error #3:
No variety in subject matter
Mix of content
Tips and advice Interviews/ reviews
Exciting updates Case studies
Opinion pieces Multimedia clips
46. SOCIAL MEDIA AND BLOGGING
• Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube all
offer opportunities for businesses with blogs.
• Use your blog to tie them all together.
50. Emily Hill, CEO, Write My Site
Thanks for listening –
any questions?
@emilyhill1982
emily.hill@writemysite.co.uk
slideshare.net/EmilyHill1
51. FREE CONSULTATION
To book, email emily.hill@writemysite.co.uk
FREE 15 minute phone
consultation with me –
I’ll review your blog, or
make suggestions about
how to start one.
You’re under absolutely
NO OBLIGATION of any
kind!
Notes de l'éditeur
Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University. Google initially used Stanford’s domain name (google.stanford.edu) before registering google.com as a domain name in September 1998. It indexed 60 million sites in its first year.
Clearly, Google was huge. A whole new industry sprang up to meet the demands of organisations who wanted to position their website over and above their competitors’ sites in the search listings. That industry was called SEO: Search Engine Optimisation.
However – as much as companies loved SEO, Google despised it.
Last of these caused absolute chaos as the number of websites indexed by Google grew from millions to billions and beyond. Countless link farms, article ‘spinning’ services and sites sprang up to help people cheat the algorithm, which for a long time counted only the quantity of links and not the quality.
By the end of the ‘naughties’, Google decided to do something about the problem: 3 dramatic algorithm updates, all intended to wipe out manipulative SEO and clean up the Internet
Something interesting had started to happen – as the user experience changed, so too did user behaviour. People no longer
Keywords still exist, and probably always will, because Google can’t function without them.
The underlying principle of a search engine is to collect the words people use when they search, and then deliver the information it thinks they’re looking for.
Got to get away from this idea of identical matching of keywords and content. You can still build content around a core set of keywords, but it’s about using natural language. Write for the reader and the search engines will reward you.
Biggest fear is often that by not undertaking rigorous keyword research, the search engines won’t know to return your site for a relevant query. The point is that if you have a clear and consistent approach to your content strategy that is centred around the user, your keywords will appear naturally. Old-style keyword research was about pulling up a list of keywords relevant to your type of business; modern keyword research is about learning the language of your customers and positioning all of your content towards them.
Going to conclude by showing you an example of a small business doing content really well. In fact, I became a customer of Tony’s Textiles as a direct result of their content strategy. Bought a house, winter drawing in, so needed net curtains. Never bought them before and needed them made to measure. Expected to buy from Homebase. B&Q, but ended up buying from these guys because …
They took the trouble to create simple, relevant content that helped me to understand the product properly. Went straight for their ‘How to’ guides …