I need some blogging advice please!

[Mrupp44]

My name is Matthew and I am a new PRO member and founder of my own Internet marketing company in KS. So far I love the interaction and tools and functionality of seomoz. I am a true student of seo and love the subject.

My dilemma is I know a blog is an important piece of any good seo campaign but I know very little about HOW to blog well......this is my new site and blog page. I only have a couple articles so far but many more planned. http://sawwebmarketing.com/seo-blog/

• When I read an article that would be particuarly beneficial for my visitors can i post or share that on MY blog (giving the author the credit of course) without google thinking its duplicate content?

• is there anything specific I need to do with my blog for google to "see" the new, fresh content that is being added to the site?

• I have seen "tagged" items at the bottom of some blogs. Is this important?

• Some blogs will have a word or string of 2-3 words that are a link to a specific website. Does this help me or just them or just people reading the blog?

**All I know is articles I write need to be relevant to my site and interesting and ORIGINAL and of benefit to my site visitors. **

Any advice that would help insure my blog articles get me all the juice they can would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

Matthew

ps - my site only went live a couple days ago so I am still working on a few onpage items but ANY feedback about the site itself would be spectacular!

Have a GREAT weekend!

[blacey]

Hi Matthew

I thought I would share some advice about some of the existing blog posts on your site.

http://sawwebmarketing.com/web-equity-owning-local-web-presence

This blog post doesn't have any textual content for Google and other search engines to make use of, so I would suggest adding a paragraph or two describing what the image is about, making sure to bold any relevant keywords you wish to use in the article.

http://sawwebmarketing.com/whats-the-real-deal-with-ranking-high-on-google-and-the-other-search-engines

This article is better in terms of there being more text to work with, but there are no headings at all within the article. Google will expect to see the page or post title in a

tag, so within the article I would suggest you use

and

tags where appropriate and bold keywords such as "SEO" or "Web Marketing"

http://sawwebmarketing.com/good-advice-reserve-your-name-and-childrens-names-as-domain-names-today

This article is good and I can see you've tried to add headings using strong/bold tags for things like, "Why is this is a good idea?" but for this I would suggest using a heading like

Is buying a domain using your children's names a good idea?

• This allows you to have "domain" and "buying" as 2 potential keywords that Google will attribute to the blog post when indexing the post.

It might be a good idea to also create a blogger or wordpress.com domain and post content on there as well. If nothing else this would allow you to have a backlink to your main site from a more authoritative site. I know that wordpress.com blogs allow you to auto post a tweet and facebook post when you add an article.

For self-hosted WordPress blogs this functionality isn't available natively but there are plugins that will post a tweet or facebook post when you add new content.

I hope I've been of some help or given you a few ideas for you to try.

Ben

[Mrupp44]

thank you for the good info and taking the time to respond!!

[dogflog]

Hey mrupp44,

Good luck with the blog. Nice choice using wordpress.

* When I read an article that would be particuarly beneficial for my visitors can i post or share that on MY blog (giving the author the credit of course) without google thinking its duplicate content?

Yes, you can but, why not create your own unique article, adding your thoughts and personal insights and link back the article you like? Obviously you don't want to plagiarize any other content but,  there is no topic that hasn't been written about before.

_* is there anything specific I need to do with my blog for google to "see" the new, fresh content that is being added to the site? _

Yes, use a good SEO Plugin that creates and submits sitemaps, which it appears as though you are. Wordpress SEO is a great plugin but, you need to set all your titles correctly.

You also want to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Using Yoast WP SEO your sitemap would be:  /sitemap_index.xml

* I have seen "tagged" items at the bottom of some blogs. Is this important?

I would LOVE for someone to come back and give me a good reason why Tags are important at all. I used them for a long time and recently I completely dumped them on most of the blogs I run. Far less concern about duplicate content and crawl issues. Life is just easier now and rankings improve dramatically on the sites where I lost them. I am going to completely eliminate all tags shortly.

The beauty of wordpress is you can go back later when your site is very deep in terms of content and add them, just for navigation purposes. The other beauty is you can Perm 301 Redirect any "tag pages" with the best redirect plugin available: Pretty Links Lite

As opposed to tags at the bottom of a page try YARPP Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Very handy plugin.

_* Some blogs will have a word or string of 2-3 words that are a link to a specific website. Does this help me or just them or just people reading the blog? _

If you are referring to the anchor text with a link that leads off your site to another site? Then they help both but they help the recipient a little more (usually).

Writing a very optimized and well worded article (written for readers not Search Engines) with a few resource links to VERY WELL RESPECTED pages in your niche will help your own optimization efforts and your readers will appreciate it too.

However, you do not want to write an article targeting Local Search and link outwards to another resource using the targeted keyword Local Search in the anchor text. That is cannibalization and it will not help you.

The key phrase is:

**All I know is articles I write need to be relevant to my site and interesting and ORIGINAL and of benefit to my site visitors. **

YOU GOT IT!!!