I do however keep the site active, and from time to time get various requests to guest post on this site. For the most part I ignore these, as I’m not familiar with the blogger, or I don’t have an interest in their content.

That changed when I received an email from Gareth Simpson, who had some very interesting topics he was pitching. After reading his piece, I just knew I wanted to share it here.

How To Rank Your Brand With Links In 2024

We all know that links help your website rank, but how can you build powerful links for your brand that have real impact beyond just a simple authority signal? What link building tactics should you be thinking about as you plan out your annual SEO strategy and budget? Here are some different long term strategies you can use to rank your brand in 2024.

Get the community behind your links

A great way to build successful links fast is to work with the people around you and get as many people as possible involved with your content. Why?

• People are more likely to link back to something if they’ve been included in it.
• Using your community for content will help you cut content production time, and create more user-focused content.

How to feature other people in your content for links

Build up a reputation as someone who is likely to share and promote other people’s content and businesses – it will make people more likely to link back to you. This isn’t just something that’s ‘nice’ to do – be really strategic on who you promote, and why – always look for mutual benefit and value. Some content formats that work well:

• Link roundups – hosting your own link roundup doesn’t take long, and it is a great way to encourage social shares, engagement and backlinks to your content. Hosting your own link roundup is also a great leverage for when you want to be included in someone else’s! If you’re aiming to be included in other people’s roundups – make sure your outreach emails are persuasive, yet concise. Use the power of social proof and always name drop someone you both know, or find common ground if you can.
• Interview features – conducting interviews with people allows you to build relationships, and people love to include interviews on their press or media pages. Interviews also often lead to reciprocal interview requests.
• The expert roundup – get influencers to comment on a specific topic by asking them to contribute a few lines to your blog in exchange for some online awareness. You could ask them to comment on a common business or personal challenge, or provide their insight on a very specific industry topic that’s got the town talking. Sometimes even just a tweet is enough to convey a message effectively so do your outreach via social media if it’s easier – just make sure you are concise, but persuasive. These people are busy – don’t waste their time.

Build a resource

Building a content resource can take some research and development time, but it’s a fantastic way to get more links back to your website. Whether it’s a calculator, a dynamic quiz, or detailed infographic – go for something very niche-specific that has lots of user value. You want something that people are going to find revelatory: something they want to bookmark right there and then.

• Here are some great content ideas and resources to get you started, but remember that originality works best. If you have to follow in someone else’s footsteps, go above and beyond what they did and make your resource bigger and better.
• Any resource you create will need to be properly marketed and presented in order for it to get good backlinks. Pay for PPC and social media advertising to help raise awareness. Targeted email and social campaigns also work well – look for industry resource pages or knowledge base sites who would benefit from linking to you.

Outreach your content or expertise

Link building is about putting yourself out there – don’t be shy. Shout about your great content and learn how to sell to editors and PR managers as well as potential customers. Here are some great guest posting resources to get you started.

• Getting in touch with websites in your industry to get a link back to one of your on-page resources is a great place to start for relevant, quality links. To sweeten the deal, offer them a guest post commenting on a recent industry trend, showing how people can tackle their own challenges. The key to success here is finding relevant sites and building relationships – spend lots of time identifying targets and writing great emails to maximize returns. Don’t just ask for a link – show how your resource and guest post is going to benefit their audience. A really powerful email and value proposition are super important.
• Try to clarify that you are not looking for paid advertisement, but hope to offer content of real value. Different websites have different rules about outbound content and sponsored content, so make sure you are careful with who you outreach to.
• Remember that before you can even start, you have to work hard on your on-site content offering – you have to impress people who are experts in your field. Don’t forget to revisit your entire site as a whole – a great resource can be let down if the rest of the domain is lacking.

Work with bloggers and influencers

Loads of bloggers work with brands and are open to promoting you if you’re offering something that is of value to their audience. Blogger and influencer partnerships can be really fruitful and powerful if managed in the right way, but you can also end up getting tangled in knots if you don’t play by the rules.

• Think of relevancy whenever you suggest a partnership with someone. Bloggers are very careful about their audiences and won’t want to ‘sell out’ and promote something they have no interest in.
• The best relationships offer value for both parties – make sure that you are clear on how you are going to work together and for how long. Spend time getting to know bloggers and learn what makes them ‘tick’ to get the most out of it.
• As well as hyperlinks, citations, brand mentions, and social shares are all part of the ‘noise’ that search engines pick up on when judging website authority – don’t just solely focus on links – include people’s networks of influence, and work with people who are going to organically grow your brand following.

Know your niche

One way in which brands go wrong with link building is reading huge SEO link building guides and then running off and trying to implement all the tactics at once by themselves (or with their agency).

• One of the best ways to get great links is to really focus on your niche and industry and create something of value and different that you just know people are going to link to. Really think about your industry in-depth when creating outstanding content.
• Use your knowledge of the industry to identify key influencers and players, predict trends, and be helpful – by being on the pulse you are much more likely to find link building avenues.
• Become the ‘go to’ person for specific niche problems and challenges – specialization is a great way to differentiate.
• Being creative and reacting to things with humor (comic strips, Twitter roundups etc.) can be just as effective as being informative and helpful online.
• Get busy commenting on relevant forums and blogs – these types of backlinks are great for building your credibility and authority as a brand.

One last word on links

Brands must be very careful with anchor texts and link volume – you don’t want to be hit by search engine penalties or hinder your rankings potential because of links that seem unnatural or manufactured. Don’t say yes to a link building method if you don’t really understand its consequences – seek advice, but don’t be tempted by easy wins and ‘link packages’ offered by some SEOs.

What do you think is stopping your brand’s website from ranking? Do you need more backlinks, or does your on-page need some help? Do you want to rank your brand?

Gareth Simpson – Technical SEO & Startup Founder

Gareth has worked as an SEO for almost a decade now and has recently started his own content agency whilst also freelancing as a technical SEO. His SEO specialisms are content and blogger outreach…and he likes green tea. You can follow him on Twitter @SimpsonGareth.

The post How To Rank Your Brand With Links In 2024 appeared first on Blogging Flail.

I initially wrote this post on the SEO impact of subdomains vs subdirectories in Feb. of 2014. A lot can change in the SEO world in just over a year, so I thought it was time to revisit things to see how the results of this case study compared to things in mid-2015.

Take a look at the original case study below. At the end of this post, you’ll have the opportunity to read my revised case study: SEO subdomains vs subdirectories (the results may surprise you).

This is by far one of the more popular posts I have ever written. It has over 200 back links, and has had numerous mentions in many SEO forums (some doubting my findings). It’s even been linked from an article on Search Engine Land. Truly crazy…

I haven’t really been paying a lot of attention to this blog over the past few years. It’s July 2021, and here I am revisiting a post I did over 7 years ago. I think it’s time that we update things to see if what I found back in 2014 is still valid today. Stay tuned all, something I’m working on.

A Case Study on Subdomains vs Subdirectories

There is much debate on when to use subdomains vs subdirectories for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  There are some people that will swear the choice isn’t about SEO, but should be more about your business situation.  I agree your business needs should drive the use of subdomains on your site, but I’ll also debate that SEO should also factor into this decision.

Here’s the fact, if you set up your blog as a subdomain instead of a subdirectory, the ranking of your blog will suffer.  I’ll prove that below in my case study.

When to use a subdomain

First a brief review on subdomains vs subdirectories.  Using the following example:

asubdomain.asitename.com/afolder/

asubdomain is the subdomain of the site, asitename is the domain, and afolder is the subdirectory (also known as a folder).

A sub-domain is treated by the search engines as a truly unique website.  So if you have one domain with 3 different subdomains established, each is treated differently by Google.  Any “link juice” that has been established for the main site (or any of the sub-domains) isn’t necessarily passed onto the sub-domains.  This is an important fact to remember, especially if you have a well-established site with a number of back-links.  You’ll be starting over in terms of link building if you create a subdomain.

However, there are valid reasons to use a sub-domain:

1. Your site may sell a product or offer a service, but you want a presence in multiple languages.  A subdomain could be established for each language you are targeting.
2. Franchises may all focus on the same products, but will have unique content that needs to be called out for each franchisee (owner information, address, phone, specials, etc…).  In this case a subdomain would be set up for each franchise store.
3. Differing products for your company.  Perhaps your company wants to focus marketing efforts for some of the various products they sell, in this case a subdomain may be a better approach to targeting traffic to each unique product.

These are just a few reasons and by no means are hard and fast rules.  Your business situation should determine when you want to establish a subdomain.  Just keep in mind, you are starting off from scratch in terms of SEO every time you create a new subdomain for your site.

Case Study – Subdomains vs Subdirectories for SEO

Let’s get to the meat of this article, looking at subdomains vs subdirectories.  The following situation is fact, the site is real, and the search engine ranking is true.  I’ve developed this case study to prove there is a difference in search engine ranking when using a subdirectory.

Problem

Quite simply I wasn’t ranking, for anything, anywhere.  Not in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or even Google’s Blog search. Now before everyone starts saying you need to understand SEO concepts, I’ll tell you I do.  I may not be an SEO Consultant or Search Engine expert, but I get it.  I’ve maintained multiple blogs over the past few years, and have had my fair share of keywords that have ranked in the top 3 of Google’s search results, as well as keywords that have ranked number 1 in the SERP’s..

In my particular case, I had a site that I developed for a little side project that I was working on for myself. The site I’m referencing is a Career Network that I created called Vircara, and the intent is to bring students and professionals together to help students define a career choice. Great idea if you are a professional and want to mentor students.

I wanted a means to drive traffic to my main site, so I thought what better way to do that then establish a blog and focus on keywords that I was interested in targeting.  I wanted to separate my blog from my main site, so I set up the blog using WordPress as a subdomain on my site (blog.vircara.com).

Facts of my Set-Up

To help everyone understand a little more on this site, here are the facts so you can understand how this fits into the SEO analysis.

• This is an established domain, one that was originally set up by myself over 3 years ago
• The subdomain in question was originally created in March 2012
• The WordPress blog was established in March 2012 and had content posted to it throughout 2012 and 2013
• On page SEO optimization was done to my key content, with much emphasis on one particular post that I was trying to rank for
• Backlinks were built over time to both the subdomain, other articles on the site, and the post I was trying to rank for using reputable SEO practices.  These backlinks consisted of both no-follow and do-follow links.
• I had links in my subdomain that pointed back to my main domain and links in my main domain that pointed back to the subdomain
• I focused my backlink strategy to the subdomain (and related posts), however there were a few backlinks that I had also built to the main domain.
• I was using a WordPress Theme that is targeted for SEO, something that I verified.  In fact, I tried a number of different themes before settling on my current theme to see if that would make any difference.

Sub-Domain Use (The Before)

The primary key word I was targeting was “choosing a career”.  While this keyword does have some competition, it’s not so popular where I shouldn’t be able to rank at least in the top 100.   To frustrate me even more, I couldn’t even rank in the top 100 in Google’s Blog search tool.  My blog name wasn’t even showing up in the Blog Search, which told me Google didn’t even recognize it as a blog.

The following screen shot shows the results of a search on my keyword for my targeted domain name:

Directory Use (The After)

After doing much research on the use of subdomains vs subdirectories, I decided to give the subdirectory route a go to see if that would make a difference.  I set up a new instance of my WordPress blog as a subdirectory, exported my content from the subdomain instance, and imported that into my new blogs instance.  I also set up 301 redirects from the subdomain posts to the new posts in the subdirectory, and then finally deleted the blog instance in the subdomain. I wanted to ensure the 301 redirects were in place for two reasons:

1. Google wouldn’t penalize me for any duplicate content that it may have indexed
2. Any incoming links to my subdomain would now point to the new instance of my WordPress blog in the subdirectory.

After verifying that all of my redirects were working, I waited.  I gave it two weeks to ensure Google had a chance to index my new content, or at least attempt to crawl the old content so it could encounter my 301 redirect to the new content.

After two long weeks of waiting, and verifying that my new content was indeed indexed, I ran my tool once again to see where I ended up in the search rankings.  And the result is – position 57 in the Google SERP’s.

Conclusion

I went from somewhere out of the top 100, and I know for a fact I wasn’t even in the top 200, to being number 57 in the SERP’s simply by changing from a subdomain to a subdirectory.  Everything else related to my site remained constant.

Pretty clear evidence, at least in my simple mind, that putting your blog in a subdirectory has a significant impact on SEO over having it in a subdomain.

I would be very interested in hearing everyone thoughts on this matter, and would love to know what experiences you’ve had with subdomains vs subdirectories.

Note: This post is part of a broader topic on things to be aware of when starting a new blog.

If you’re looking for more information on improving the SEO of your site, you may want to speed your site up by using a CDN with Amazon CloudFront and W3 Total Cache.

Read My Latest on Subdomains vs Subdirectories For SEO

As I mentioned in the opening of this post, I decided to do another test on the SEO impacts of using a subdomain vs a subdirectory.

You can download that case study right here – SEO Subdomains vs Subdirectories.

The post An SEO Guide On Subdomains vs Subdirectories appeared first on Blogging Flail.

What is Fiverr?

I’m sure most everyone has heard of Fiverr.com, if not I’ll give a brief overview.  Fiverr is a service that offers gigs, where you can pretty much buy anything for as little as $5. One of the attractions to this service for website owner’s, is that you can purchase links to your website or blog in a variety of different forms, all good for SEO (or so the thought goes).

• If you want a single link back to your site embedded in a blog post that you write, you can pay someone $5 to publish that to their blog
• If you want someone to write a blog post for you on a certain topic, you can do that for $5
• If you want to pay someone $5, you can get over 20,000 blog comments with backlinks to your site
• If you want to have someone submit an article you wrote to multiple article directories, someone will do that for $5

You get the idea, there are literally hundreds of Fiverr backlink gigs being offered that will supposedly boost the SEO presence of your site. Is spending $5 for a Fiverr backlink worth the cost to you, lets find out.

Fiverr Backlink Review – A Case Study

I thought it would be interesting to do a quick test to see if see if a Fiverr backlink was worth the $5.

Current Situation

I have a post on another site where I’ve been playing around with different SEO strategies, and I thought this would be a good one to test a Fiverr backlink against. The post in question has been bouncing between positions 54 – 62 when doing a search in Google for my keyword, mostly hovering right around position 57.  So I’ve been trying different things to see how that impacts this result in the search engines.

I haven’t touched this post in over 2 weeks, nor have I done any back linking to the site in that same period of time. I wanted to be sure there would be nothing else that could be impacting the search engine ranking, other than the new backlink I would be receiving from the Fiverr gig.

Now I realize there are good and bad gigs that you can purchase.  Paying $5 to have someone give me 20,000 links to my site in a very short period of time doesn’t seem like something Google would be too happy with.  On the other hand, if I took the time to write a post (that contained a link back to my site), and paid someone to have that posted on their blog, that seemed a little more reasonable.

I found what I thought was a good gig.  The specific gig in question would publish a post that I wrote, that could contain one backlink to my site, on a PR6 blog that just so happened to be in my niche.  The gig had positive feedback from over 100 happily paying customers.

Results after the gig

It took just over a day to have my gig completed, and I received an email that contained the link to the site that had my post published.  After doing some research, sure enough the main domain had a PR6 showing.  I also checked a few other tools to validate the domain & page authority of the site were legitimate.
After waiting another day and verifying that my new guest post was now indexed, I anxiously checked my new SERP result – position 61. Two days later it was back at position 57.  So while I had initially lost 4 positions in the SERP’s after having my Fiverr gig completed, it seemed to settle back to its original position.  This was over a week ago, I’ve been checking my position every day since then and it hasn’t moved from there.

Conclusion on Fiverr Backlinks

I expected better results from a site that claims to have a PR6 especially since it was in my blog niche. Could it have been a fake PR?  Sure, but it didn’t seem that way after I did some research.  In any case, I would have expected some bump in my rankings even if it didn’t have much of a page rank associated with it.
If you’ve had better results, I’d love to get your feedback.

Image attribution: John Twohig Photography via photopin

The post Fiverr Backlink Review – The Real Story appeared first on Blogging Flail.

This guide is focused on the WordPress.com platform. If you are a new blogger and are interested in getting your content ranked, by all means keep reading.  Don’t listen to the experts that say you need to be on the self-hosted platform of WordPress if you are serious about blogging. You can definitely get your content to show up on the first page of Google using my WordPress.com SEO guide. Trust me, I did it with my personal blog when I was first starting out, and had great success ranking on the first page of Google with a few of my choice key words.

WordPress.com SEO Guide

A little about this WordPress.com SEO Guide. This is geared towards the new blogger, so I won’t be getting all technical on you. I’ll keep this SEO guide simple, and give you just enough to help you understand what some of the secrets are to getting your content to rank.

What is SEO? SEO is short of Search Engine Optimization. As the name implies, it’s the practice of optimizing your content for the search engines. When you do a search in Google, I’m willing to bet that you click on one of the first 3 results that are displayed roughly 80% of the time. Think about that next time you do a search. How does Google determine what order the content is displayed in their results page? Google has an entire algorithm that is constantly being tweaked to determine how they show results in their search pages. The details of this algorithm are mostly secret, however there are a few well known items to focus on, which is where we will begin.

The WordPress Theme

Believe it or not, the WordPress.com Theme you use for you blog design has a lot to do with how your blog will rank in the search engines. So logic would dictate that we start with this. However, you first need to understand a little bit about what Google looks for in your blog, and how it uses that to determine where it places your content in the search engine results page (SERP).

Given that, know there are 100’s of free Theme’s to choose from in WordPress.com, and not all of them are created equal when it comes to SEO. You’ll want to be sure you use a Theme that will help your WordPress.com SEO, not hurt it. So what theme should you use? That’s really a personal preference, as every site or blog has their own design requirements. Every one of the standard WordPress Themes (Twenty Eleven through Twenty Fourteen) are designed around SEO, and you can easily customize the look of those theme’s. That’s a pretty good place for you to start. You can change your theme quite easily via the admin panel of WordPress, so just because you are starting with the standard WordPress Theme, doesn’t mean you are stuck with it.

WordPress.com SEO Guide Attributes

The attributes that I’m about to lay out in this WordPress.com SEO Guide are the key things you should understand and focus on if you want your content to rank. So let’s take a look at what it takes to get WordPress.com SEO ready.

Blog Name (or niche)

First things first, know your niche and name your blog appropriately. If  you planning on creating a mommy type blog that focuses on cooking, crafts, and so on, make sure the name of your blog reflects the style of writing you’ll plan on doing. Instead of naming your blog something like “Jill’s Blog”, why not call it “Recipes By Jill”.

WordPress gives you the ability to give your blog a title. Head over to the Settings in the left sidebar of your WordPress admin panel, and click on the General properties. Add the name of the blog as you would like to appear. You’ll also notice a field called “tagline”, think of this as a sub-title for your blog. This can further define what it is your are blogging about. Using our above example, you would have something like the following:

Recipes By Jill

Tips on cooking, crafts, and raising a daughter 

Since we are on the subject of naming your blog, we should talk about the URL, or the name someone enter’s into a Web Browser to find your blog. It’s important to structure the URL of your blog so that it matches the name. This is a key component of the Google algorithm and will help your WordPress.com SEO. Again, using our above example, you would want your URL to be something like the following:

recipesbyjill.wordpress.com

Key Words

When it comes to WordPress.com SEO, it’s all about the keywords you are targeting. What’s a keyword? A keyword is simply the search term you are trying to target. Lets say you are writing a post to share this great recipe you have on Chocolate Cake. Ask yourself what would someone enter into Google to find a chocolate cake recipe. Chances are they would enter something like “chocolate cake recipe”, or “homemade chocolate cake recipe”. Keep in mind the more descriptive you get with your keyword, the less competition you’ll have with other blogs or websites, and the better chance you’ll have in ranking higher in the Google SERP’s. When you have an idea for a post, try to identify the keyword you are targeting for that post.

Post Heading/Title

The first thing you do when creating a blog post is come up with the heading or title for that post. That’s the first box you see in the WordPress interface when creating new post content. You’ll want to include the keyword you identified for your post in that Title box. WordPress also uses this heading as the Title Tag for your blog. The title is probably one of the most important pieces of Google’s algorithm related to WordPress.com SEO. What’s the Title you ask? Well that’s what shows up in the Google Search results page (SERP), as well as what’s displayed in the tab on your browser for the page you are viewing.

You want your keyword to be used in both the heading and title, and with WordPress.com that’s automatically done for you as long as you include the keyword in the heading. For the title tag, ideally your keyword is placed at the beginning of the string to give it optimum recognition. So when creating the heading for your post, be sure the keyword is placed at the beginning of that heading.

Side Note: When using WordPress.com as your blogging platform, you’re stuck with having your heading and title being the same. When using a WordPress self-hosted install, you have the flexibility, via Plugin’s, to make your heading and title two different strings.

URL Post Slug

A slug is simply a name given to the URL string of your blog, and is very important when it comes to WordPress.com SEO. The Post Slug is the URL string that uniquely identifies your post. Using this post as an example, the post slug is: “wordpress-com-seo-guide”. They keyword I’m targeting for this post is “wordpress.com seo guide”, and you’ll notice I’ve separated each of those words by a dash (-) in my post slug.

WordPress will default your post slug based upon what you’ve entered in your heading, however you have the ability to update this to whatever you want. Again, your keyword should be a part of the post slug, with words separated by a dash. Keep the post slug to 3 or 4 words max, You can update this field directly beneath the Post Title field.

Key Word Density (Content)

If you want the search engines to recognize your keyword, logic would dictate you need to use that keyword in your content. Use the keyword you identified throughout the content of your post, in a logical manner that sounds natural to the reader. Do not use your keyword over and over, thinking the more you use it, the better chance you’ll have of getting ranked. In fact, if you use it too much, Google will penalize you which will in turn hurt your ranking.

How much is too much? Good question, that’s one of the many secrets of Google’s search algorithm. There are many experts that state your keyword density, or how much your keyword is used in comparison to the total words in a post should be somewhere between 1% and 2%. While that may not seem like a lot, you’ll be surprised at how many times you need to creatively use your keyword to get to that magical number.

How do you know what your keyword density is? You’ll have to use a tool to help you identify this. There are a number of free tools available that will help you understand the keyword density of your content before or after you publish your post. You simply enter the URL of your post (or paste your content), and these tools will crawl your content and supply you with the keyword density. Do a search on “keyword density tool” and pick one of the many tools that are displayed. A favorite tool of mine can be found at SEOBook.

Heading Tags

While not a key characteristic of WordPress.com SEO, having your keyword in a heading can help. A quick word about heading tags. A heading tag is a way in HTML to create headings for your content, very similar to adding headings to an MS Word document. You have 6 different heading options to choose from as you are writing your post.

In the previous section on Post Title/Heading, we talked about setting the Title or Heading of your post. If the WordPress Theme you are using is SEO friendly, this Post Title will become the Header 1 for your post. You only want one Header 1 in your post, as this is what Google gives priority to for SEO purposes. A good theme will normally use a Header 2 for the Blog Name and/or Tagline that we previously talked about. That leaves you 4 different header options to choose for your content (Header 3 – Header 6). I typically use a Header 3 for my main topics (try to use your keyword here), and use a Header 4 for subsections within those topics.

Freshness

Search engines love websites whose content is constantly changing. The theory goes, if you are updating your content frequently, it must be newsworthy. You’re thinking I’m writing a blog, I don’t plan on changing a post that much once I publish it. While that may be the case, there’s a few things you can do so it appears that your content is being updated on a frequent basis.

If you look over in my right sidebar, you’ll see a widget that I have installed of my recent posts. Anytime I create a new post, that entry will now show at the top of the widget, and the last entry will roll off. Think about it. That widget shows up on every blog article I’ve published. When I create a new post, the widget is updated, and every single post is updated as well. To the search engines, it appears that every blog post was just updated. There are other widgets you can add that will do the same thing, and they are all available in your WordPress admin panel under Appearance.

Inbound Links

Everything we’ve talked about in this WordPress.com SEO guide so far is considered on-site SEO, meaning your rank in the search engines is determined by the content on your site. One other key factor in SEO is your off-site strategy, or simply the links back to your site. Another site that links back to any content to your site, is a vote of confidence in your site. The more respectable the link, the more power the vote has. This is a whole topic in itself, but suffice to say it can’t hurt trying to get your blog some links that point to it.

While you can rank well for keywords that don’t have a ton of competition without any links, a solid backlink strategy will help you rank for those competitive keywords.

Wrap Up

SEO doesn’t need to be confusing, in fact if you focus on writing good content that is geared towards humans and not search engines, that’s half the battle. The facts I’ve laid out in this WordPress.com SEO Guide are the basics to get you started. I could dive into further detail on each of these topics, and there are a host of other items that we didn’t even touch on, but that isn’t really necessary to get you started.

Bookmark this guide, and reference it as you are setting up your blog or writing new content. Once you’ve done it a few times, it will become second nature. If something isn’t working, take the time to revise your post for further SEO benefit.

Feel free to ask questions in the comment section below. I check this blog frequently, and will be happy to answer any questions you may have. Best of luck, and happy blogging.

The post The Complete WordPress.com SEO Guide appeared first on Blogging Flail.

I thought this might be a good time to do a little case study on the WordPress Permalink Structure SEO impact of a permalink change for a few of the keywords I’ve been tracking.

WordPress Permalink Structure SEO

When you migrate from WordPress.com using the site migration upgrade, you are required to use the same permalink structure that was used on your WordPress.com blog. I described that in detail in my post on implementing the site redirect upgrade.

To summarize that post, you need to use the “Day and Name” option which isn’t the best option for SEO purposes. The permalink structure you should be using for a new blog, at least for SEO purposes, is the “Post Name” option. So that’s exactly what I did with my personal blog. After going through the initial migration and letting things settle for over a month, I changed the permalink structure over to “Post Name”, implemented the proper redirects, and waited for Google to find it’s way to my new URL

I was wondering about the WordPress Permalink structure SEO impacts on my ranking, so I documented the search results for 10 of my favorite keywords. Is the “Post Name” option really that much better for SEO than the “Day and Name” option? After waiting a few weeks, I had my result.

WordPress Permalink Structure SEO Impact

I created the following before and after comparison for the 10 keywords I was tracking:

As you can see, it does make a difference. In all cases but one, which I’ll describe more below, the permalink change either had a positive impact or no impact at all. For 5 of my keywords that were already ranking #1, there was no change. For 4 of the keywords, there was a positive change and in 2 of those cases this change was dramatic.

So what about the one keyword that didn’t fare so well? This keyword had a decline of 3 positions in the SERP’s. I don’t believe this is a result of the permalink structure change, but more so was a result of some minor tweaking I did to the posts content right after I made the permalink change. I realized, after the fact, that I shouldn’t have made any content changes, as this could have an impact on any search results.

Conclusion

So is there a WordPress Permalink structure SEO impact? I’m convinced there is, and wouldn’t hesitate to use the “Post Name” permalink option on any other blog I’m using. If you throw out the one keyword that I consider being invalid for this test, there was either a positive or no impact  in 100% of all keywords I tested.

Opinions?

The post Case Study: WordPress Permalink Structure SEO Impacts appeared first on Blogging Flail.

Some Background

This blog I was migrating was a personal blog hosted on WordPress.com. It just so happened that I was ranking very well for a number of keywords that I was blogging about. The funny thing is, I really wasn’t trying to rank for these keywords. I ended up writing a few posts that I happened to be very passionate about, and gave no thought to any on-site optimization techniques when I was writing these posts. It just goes to show you that quality content is truly king.

I leveraged the WordPress.com Site Redirect Upgrade to aid in the migration. If you’re not familiar with this option, this is a paid upgrade that will implement a 301 redirect on your WordPress.com site.  If you’re interested, I covered this in more detail in my post on migrating from WordPress.com.

SEO Impacts Migrating From WordPress.com

Before & After Analysis

I created a simple table that compares my ranking for a number of keywords. I did some quick analysis the morning before I did the upgrade to identify the current rank for these keywords. After 13 days, to ensure Google had indexed all of the pages on my new site, I checked these rankings again. The results can be seen in the following table:

The results are pretty much what I expected, no real change to the ranking factors for these keywords. In fact, 60% of the keywords I was monitoring had no change in their rank, 20% of the keywords had a better rank, and the other 20% saw a decline in their rankings. There was one keyword that saw a huge jump in it’s ranking, all they way to position 11 from position 39 in the SERP’s. something I really can’t explain.

Theme Change

The unknown for me was what impact a new WordPress theme would have on my rankings. Since you are somewhat limited on the themes you can use on a WordPress.com blog, limited is relative since there are 100’s of free themes to choose from, I thought perhaps I would see a slight bump by using a highly tuned SEO theme. Granted the theme I was using was a free theme, but it is tuned for SEO and has been documented as such by the developer. In any case, the theme change may have had something to do with the 4 keywords that saw a slight rise & decline in the rankings..

Conclusion

So are there SEO impacts migrating from WordPress.com? The short answer is no.  If you are hesitant about migrating from a WordPress.com blog in fear of losing your current rankings, don’t be. My migration had no significant impact to my rankings in the SERP’s.

I’ll be doing another test in the coming weeks to see if there is any change related to implementing a new Permalink structure, which will require adding another level of redirects. After that, we’ll take a look at the impacts of upgrading to a premium WordPress theme.

If anyone has had different results related to their migration to a self-hosted blog, please leave me a comment below. I would love to compare stories.

The post SEO Impacts Migrating From WordPress.com appeared first on Blogging Flail.

Results from the First Fiverr Gig

The gig that I first purchased was giving me a guest post on a PR6 site, in my niche, using an article that I created. The gig had nothing but positive feedback, from well over 100 paying customers.

Once the gig was completed, I received the URL of the site that my article was posted to. Once I verified the link was in place, and gave it a few days to ensure Google was able to index my new guest post, I checked the ranking of the key word I was targeting. Prior to that guest post being published, I was hovering in the high 50’s for my keyword.  After the guest post was published, it lost a few positions before settling back into the high 50’s.

Case Study – Are Fiverr Backlinks Bad For SEO (Take 2)

Given that the results showed no change in the ranking of my keyword, I wanted to do another test to see if a different gig would have different results.

Description of Gig

This time I found a different gig that would write a guest post for me, and post it to their PR3 blog. This was a blog that was also in my niche. I also wanted to experiment a little with the quality of writing I would receive when having someone else do the hard work, and have them write the article for me.

Results After The Gig

The gig took a little longer to deliver then the first gig I purchased, but it was within the time frame the seller had established. Again I received the URL the article was posted to, verified that content of that article as well as my link, the page rank of the site, and waited for Google to index that post.

Article Quality

A quick word on the quality of the article I received. While the content wasn’t horrible, let’s just say it’s not something that I would have posted on my site. It was obvious the article was written by someone that wasn’t using English as their primary language. This was more or less then what I expected, and honestly wasn’t expecting much for $5.

The Results

After double checking everything one more time, it was time to check the SERP’s. When analyzing my targeted keyword, I fell to position 64 in the search results page.  That’s right; this guest post caused my ranking to fall by 7 positions.

Conclusion

So let’s review why I believe Fiverr backlinks are bad for SEO. I had 2 guest posts published to the following sites:

• PR6 site , in my niche, using an article that I wrote
• PR3 site, in my niche, using an article that was written for me by the seller of the gig

Before either of these guest posts, the ranking for my keyword was hovering right around position 57 in the Google SERP’s.  After both posts had been published and indexed, I lost a total of 7 positions. Not a very good investment for $10.

Would I do this again for a site that I was truly trying to rank for? I’d save the $5 – $10 that I just spent. This is not to say there are other gigs you can purchase on Fiverr that will help with your SEO needs, but I just don’t see the value in the guest posts that I purchased.  Perhaps we’ll explore these options in another post.

So are Fiverr backlinks bad for SEO? What do you think? Let me know about your experiences using Fiverr for link building or other guest posting services.
photo credit: the UMF via photopin cc

The post Why Fiverr Backlinks Are Bad for SEO appeared first on Blogging Flail.

Now that you’ve published your first post, or any post for that matter, you need to put some effort into ensuring it gets read. You can create the best content in the world, but if a potential reader can’t find it, that doesn’t do you much good does it.

Getting Your Post Indexed

You really only need to worry about this once, and that’s after you publish the first post on your blog. Once Google has indexed your site the first time, it will continue to crawl your site on a regular basis.  If you’ve set up your sidebar to include links to your recent posts, Google will be able to see those links and follow them so that every subsequent post you create will also be indexed.

To be sure Google and Bing are able to index your site the first time, be sure that you submit your blog to their respective search engines.

Submit to Google:

https://www.google.com/submityourcontent/website-owner/#

Submit to Bing:

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url

Building Backlinks

Backlinks are other pages on the Internet that point or link to your content, and are a key mechanism of getting readers to your blog.  Backlinks are also a key component of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and are a key indicator to the search engines regarding the value of your post.  If you have a high-quality site linking to your blog content, Google looks very highly on that.

There are two types of backlinks that exist, those that are marked as “no follow” and those that are not (meaning it is a “do follow” link).  With a do follow link, Google and other search engines give your site credit for the incoming link. Meaning, you site gets credit for this link as part of the algorithm that the search engines use (helps your site rank higher).  With a no follow link, the search engines will follow that link to your site, but you don’t always receive credit for it (it’s doesn’t always help with your sites ranking).

Leaving comments on other blogs within your niche is a great way to get a no follow link.  You might be asking, why would I want a no follow link if the search engines won’t give me credit for it.  Great question!  Remember, while trying to rank well with the search engines, you are also trying to get readers to your site.  By leaving valuable comments on other blogs, readers of those other blogs will be able to see your comment, and follow the link back in your comment to your site.

Do follow links are much harder to get, and are somewhat out of scope for this post.  A great way to get do follow links is by networking with other blog owners, and trying to get Guest Posts on those blogs.  A guest post is simply a blog post you create for someone else’s site.  The advantage of doing a guest post, is you typically are allowed to put a link in that post back to your site.  So not only do you get a do follow link out of this, that the search engines will give you credit for, but readers of that blog post will also be able to link back to your site to read your content.  We’ll explore guest posting in more detail in later posts on this site.

Social Media

Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) is a great way for you to announce your blog content to your followers.  Most of us have one or more accounts on the popular social media sites, so why not leverage that to announce that you’ve got a new post on such and such.  This is a great way for you to build a reader base and draw additional followers to your account.

The post Making Your Post Visible appeared first on Blogging Flail.