23 replies to this topic

[wowyourfunny]

Someone asked me if starting a blog is any different than any other website?

He is a lawyer/attorney. I'm wondering if you can optimize a blog to rank for terms such as personal injury lawyer in los angeles, or... for whatever reason, a blog is restricted from ranking the same way a static HTML website would rank?

any ideas?

[nethy]

Yes, blogs are not allowed by Google.

[wowyourfunny]

Yes, blogs are not allowed by Google.

what do you mean by "not allowed"?

when you run a google search for "los angeles search engine optimization" http://www.adiazar.com/ comes up #5 or #6. That appears to be a blog.

Edited by wowyourfunny, 01 January 2008 - 07:11 PM.

[wowyourfunny]

what do you mean by "not allowed"?

in addition, are links from blogs less important than links from static websites?

[Jill]

A blog is simply a collection of web pages just like any other website. So the answer to the question is yes, of course you can optimize it to rank well in the search engines for the targeted relevant keyword phrases.

a blog is restricted from ranking the same way a static HTML website would rank

"Static HTML website" has nothing to do with SEO. Every page is basically static to the search engines once they get to it.

[RiYo]

Yes, blogs are not allowed by Google.

Can you please explain what you mean with your statement Nethy.

richard

[Nueromancer]

Can you please explain what you mean with your statement Nethy.

richard

Blogs work fone in google and we have an in house blog property that ranks #1 for a sports related term and spanks Nike, Puma, Adidas, ETC in that space

[Sahilism]

In fact Blogs are generally optimised well out of the box.

[RiYo]

I know that blogs are generally well optimized out of the box, I even heard Matt Cutts promoting people to start using Wordpress as it was such a great out-of-the-box-seo-optimized product.

That is why I am intrigued to hear from nethy about his answer.

richard

[qkkr]

I know that blogs are generally well optimized out of the box, I even heard Matt Cutts promoting people to start using Wordpress as it was such a great out-of-the-box-seo-optimized product.

That is why I am intrigued to hear from nethy about his answer.

richard

I think nethy was trying to make some kind of joke. Not a very good one, though. Either that, or he was just looking to confuse people. I certainly have blogs that rank in the top ten for certain search terms... it wasn't even hard to do (these terms are not that competitive, though).

[nethy]

Yes I was Joking.

My understanding is that a blog is just a website. The way that content is produced or ordered is of no direct interest to a search engine. As far as they are concerned,it may as well be just a static html site with may articles and a wierd navigation structure.

They are SEO-ed out of the box, in that they are generally spider accessable and have some extras like 'so easy everyone is doing it' control over or automatically generated keyworded urls, titles & decriptions. This is because blogs constantly refer to other parts of the blogs context. It makes sense to give as much information about the topic of a page as possible in the navigation (archive navigation) etc. They also need these things (titles etc.) toeffectively communicate with all the book markeing and social networking stuff out there and still coming. If they have titles that can be used as titles this makes the communication more likely.

More importantly, the culture surrounding blogs is another factor in their favor.
-blogs naturally accumulate a lot of topical content (you have a chance at presision targeting of topic related SE queries)
-bloggers are always linking to eachother
-bloggers are constantly linking to themselves in context and with keyworded links (last year I posted about beaver social habits...)
-bloggers write a lot
-bloggers are not always trying to sell you stuff. most people on the web are notdoing things that directly interest companies at the moment.
-blogs are topical. If you feel like blogging about something, its probably ahigh interest topicat the moment. In the same way as you might here the sam conversation being had by various people in a park.

- blogs get immediate fedback on content quality in the form of emails & phone calls (surprising but there you go...), comments, mentions on other blogs, rss subscriptions (the conversion rate of a post to some analysts) etc. this is the best quality control the web has seen on non-giant (like wikepedia) sites ever.

What they have against them is the 'unconevtional' way in which the navigation is structured. the articles become fairly 'buried in the archives' particularly if noone links to them (even some excellent, popular blogs have many posts . with no links) the primary pages (ususally the 'home' page) generally have dynamic content- it changes all the time, so it will be relevant to different terms at different times. The engines are reasonably well able to deal with this themselves but traffic from a certain term today may not be their tommorrow.

This changes how you 'do seo' substantially. You don't gradually try to get more traffic from certain keywords, slowly sneak up the serp, build your relevance for certain terms over time, etc. The strategy is different. But you don't really need to do much outside of the normal blog stuff. - write posts, get people interested, get subscribers, participate in blogosphere debates, become known, become authorotive. these arenormal blog goals. They also serve seo.

Edited by nethy, 02 January 2008 - 08:46 PM.

[nethy]

Last thing I know about blog SEO is that it will be for most blogs (I recall Jill flatly disagreeing with this point so consider it an opinion) natural rankings will be the one of the top 3 broad sources of traffic and utimately readers. Likely, a 1st or 2nd. The other two are referals (when I read a post I will generally follow 1-2 links) & 'web 2.0 stuff' stumble, digg, .... have a look at http://www.kaushik.n...ce-blogger.html for some practical advice.

[whizkid16]

Thank you for clarifying (and therefore saving me a few headaches from researching this, your first post confused me)

[Jill]

Last thing I know about blog SEO is that it will be for most blogs (I recall Jill flatly disagreeing with this point so consider it an opinion) natural rankings will be the one of the top 3 broad sources of traffic and utimately readers.

Not sure what you mean by that, nethy. What exactly am I disagreeing with?

[dharrison]

Yes, blogs are not allowed by Google.

If you mean from the SERPs altgoether, then sorry I disagree. For a start - my blog ranks in the top 10 for "SEO Essex" on Google.

Furthermore, I've typed in problems to Google loads of times (eg mail server error codes) and got related forum posts, blog posts etc. If what you say was genuine, I wouldn't have got even that.

Thats why clarification is needed on what appears to be a bold statement.