Williams / Portney MASTERING BLOG MARKETING

HOW TO LAUNCH YOUR WEBSITE TO THE TOP OF GOOGLE
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9801307-2-0
Verlag: Williams Business services, Inc
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

This book will teach you how to use a blog to bring target website traffic to your site and how to naturally reach top rankings for your most important keyword phrases. Creating your own business blog is a powerful way to build your brand as the industry expert in your market. Blogs, if used correctly, are the most powerful SEO tool available. You will learn the technique of SEO blogging. Blogs are the natural way to add keyword rich content to your website on a regular basis. This is a great strategy if your website is small (5-10 pages), or if it's more graphical and lacks text content. Blogs are a natural link magnet that attracts inbound links if you write interesting, original and engaging posts. Adding 'linkable' content to your site is the natural link building method. Link building is the most important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) today. Experts have long said 'content is king.' Blogs add content to your website on a regular basis and then they broadcast your message to the world via RSS. In December of 1992, there were only 50 websites1 on the Internet. By June 2011, this has grown to over 340 million websites2. The World Wide Web continues to be more competitive. Most businesses have a website. . . or at least should. How do you compete and standout from the crowd? The World Wide Web is like the largest trade show on earth. It is a marketplace that has 2.1 billion people attending globally3. It has over 340 million booths in the form of websites. This is 6 people for every booth (website). It truly is a place where every conceivable product and service is researched bought and sold. According to a 2009 study by WebVisible and Nielsen Online, only 44% of small businesses have a website. Yet in today's marketing landscape, every business today should have an online presence. Once online, each business needs a traffic strategy to promote their websites to Google. Blogs are the answer.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Williams, Doug

Portney, David

Leseproben

2 A Brief History of Blogs   So what is a “blog” anyway? Blogs can be personal or business related. Business blogs or corporate blogs are one of the hottest growth areas for blogs, and they’re opening new markets for business. Blogs allow anyone to quickly post text and images to the Web without any special technical knowledge. This opens the web up to more publishing and distribution of information. What is it? Blog is short for weblog. A blog is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Wouldn’t it be nice if the readers of a website could leave comments, about a specific article? With blogs, they can! Posting comments is one of the best features of blogs. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others have a readership of national newspapers. On a blog, the content consists of articles — also sometimes called “posts” or “entries.” A blog is a web site that contains dated entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) about a particular topic. A blog has unfiltered content — some feel that the second somebody filters or edits the author it’s no longer a blog. Figure 2-1  Author’s blog showing the major elements of a typical blog posting. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts. The Origins and History of Blogs So when did blogging begin? Although blogs are a recent invention, the idea is not new. Blogs evolved from online diaries that people kept from the earliest days of the Internet. Blogs, as we think of them today, are a combination of a personal journal, a message board and a news site. Let’s look at the milestones of blogging. 1994 – It is uncertain who started the very first blog. Justin Hall is credited by some to be the “founding father” of blogging for starting his “Proto-Blog” in December 1994 while still a student at Swarthmore College. Justin maintained this online journaling for 11 years. 1997 Jorn Barger first used the term “web log” to describe a simple website where people post interesting links that they found while surfing the net. 1998 Open Diary launched their website which would grow to thousands. Open Diary is credited with adding the ability for readers to make comments 1999 Peter Merholz jokingly broke weblog apart into “We Blog.” This was quickly adopted and shortened to blog. Blog became adopted as both a noun and a verb. LiveJournal and Blogger.com were launched as the first hosted blog tools. 2002 Heather Armstrong was fired for discussing her job in her personal blog which was named “Dooce.”  Dooced becomes the term that means “Fired for blogging.” 2004 Merriam-Webster, the prominent dictionary publisher, announced that “Blog” was the word of the year. 2004 marked a turning point where blogging became adopted into everyday life. 2007 There were over 100 million blogs being tracked. Millions of people look to blogs as their source for information, news or just a good laugh. Blogs have become a driving force in the grass roots breaking and shaping of news stories. An example is “Rathergate” where Dan Rather presented documents on 60 Minutes that conflicted with accepted accounts of President Bush’s service records. Bloggers declared these documents forgeries and applied extreme pressure to CBS. This exposed reporting irregularities that lead to a public CBS apology. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) RSS is at the heart of what makes a blog work. Remember, a blog is a special website that allows easy web publishing with a content management system (CMS) and notifies the web each time a new article is posted (RSS). So how does this work? Once you create a new article or posting, you can make it public by publishing what you wrote. When you publish, three things happen. 1. What you wrote immediately becomes visible to your blog visitors. 2. Your blog creates an RSS-XML file that is easily read by search engines and blog engines. These XML files are really a simple text file called a feed. 3. A ping is sent out to notify that you have something new on your blog. This invites blog engines and subscribers to look at your new content. The blog ping that is sent out is a small XML file that contains the blog title, a brief description and a link to where the new content can be found. This ping is received by the major services which notifies search engines you now have new content. The blog and search engines will either display the XML feeds they received or will send their own spiders back to retrieve more information. The results are that what you write is being indexed and available on the Internet within minutes of being published. This is a similar process to the way news stories are released to the Internet. Subscribers to your feed can either be notified by ping or their feed readers will regularly go back and check your RSS-XML files to see if anything new has been posted. When the reader finds updates, it makes them available to the recipient. The readers usually display the information from the XML files with a link to the content. RSS can stand for “Real Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary.” Either way, RSS is an important technology that makes your blog postings available to be read across the Internet. RSS is what makes news articles available for searches almost immediately after they are posted. RSS are simple text files that are submitted to feed directories. These allow subscribers and search engines to see content within a very short time. Blogs generate a behind-the-scenes text code in a language called XML. This code, usually referred to as a "feed" (as in "news feed"), makes it possible for readers to "subscribe" to the content that is created on a particular blog. This way the content comes to you instead of you going to it. Your blog automatically notifies popular update services that you've updated your blog. In turn, update services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Your blog has been set-up to notify more than 30 different update services each time you make a change. It can take as little as only a few hours to appear in search engine results. RSS enables users to subscribe to data feeds easily, which lets them control the rate and amount of information coming to them online. They receive your updates by either email or via blog feed. Blog reader programs typically have the option to show the full article or just a summary (or the beginning) to syndication feeds. Readers can then come to your site to read the whole article. CMS (Content Management System) A CMS, or Content Management System, is software that provides a method of managing your website. They provide the features required to create and maintain a blog, and can make publishing on the Internet as simple as writing an article. All blogs run on some type of CMS. A content management system is a web-based application connected to a database that allows writers to create and update blog content without having to know HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or any other programming language. CMS allows writers with no special web technical knowledge to write and format their thoughts and publish to the web in a few minutes. Blog writers can create their postings as easily as typing a letter and then publishing with a single push of a button. Using CMS, blog content can be created using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editor. When a blog posting needs to be altered in some way, you just open up the blog posting, make the changes, and upload the new file. Blogs are just another way of using browser-based tools for creating, managing and publishing your thoughts, opinions, or activities directly to the web. The technology behind blogs is basic CMS functionality that originated back in the mid '90s. Using CMS, writers can format their work as well as add photos and images just like they would in their favorite word processing program. These changes are made directly on the web server from any computer that has web access. RSS Feed Readers In the blogging world, a “feed reader,” or feed aggregator, is a software application that collects web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs into a single location for easy viewing. Feeds are a free, quick and efficient way to read new web content, news and blogs. A web feed is a document (often XML-based) which contains content items with web links to longer versions. News websites and blogs are common sources for web feeds. "Publishing a feed" and "syndication" are two of the more common terms used to describe making available a feed from an information source, such as a blog. The two main web feed formats are RSS and Atom.  Figure 2-2 Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/) is one of the popular feed readers in use today Like syndicated print newspaper features or broadcast...