Today we have 2 simple blogging tips for your jewelry website.
1. Kill the keyword cloud.
A few years back the "keyword cloud" feature was pretty popular and found on most blogging sites. The feature allowed you to indicate a few important keywords or phrases for every blog entry you posted. The usage count for all these keywords was tracked and then presented as a jumbled mess of words using various size fonts. The larger fonts represented commonly used words, and the keywords in the smallest font were used only once or twice.
Keyword clouds were thought to have high SEO value because they would repeat the same words over and over on every page of your blog. The truth was that Google view this repetitive keyword usage as pure webspam and many blogs lost ranking.
Before you hire a SEO company for link building, you should check out the websites they've previously worked on, and where they link from. Think twice before hiring any company still using a cloud or spammy words.
2. Link from inside the blog entry.
This tip is not very obvious, and it relates to the design of your blog as well as how you write your blog entries.
In order to speed up the processing of a blog, Google attempts to detect the standard design structure of every page of your blog template. Google's computers are pretty smart and they can see all the identical items that repeat on every page of your blog. These repeated items include your logo at the top of your page, top menu of links, side navigation, and footer links. These items are filtered out to speed up the processing, leaving only the unique information for every page.
Most blog templates come pre-designed with a clear place to post your website address; usually this is a link at the top of the page or on the top of the side navigation. This is a very convenient method, but it's completely the wrong way to link to your website since that link will be part of your standard design structure and it will be almost completely ignored.
Our recommended method is to remove the website link from the jewelry website template design and then manually add it inside each blog entry, and change where in the blog you place it too. Put it at the top of your entry this week, in the middle next week, and at the bottom the week after next. As the expression goes, "variety is the spice of life, and of link building." Admittedly, that last bit is not as well remembered.
Here's a basic example of how linking is viewed by search engines and monitoring tools. We recently tracked all links being built to a jeweler's primary website from various blog websites. During this tracking we found more than 1000 inbound links from 1000 individual blog entries.
Each of these blog entries had the website link inside the body of the blog rather than in the standard design. Those 1000 backlinks came from approximately 100 different domain names, i.e. there were 10 blog entries per domain name with links inside each entry. Each link was seen.
At the same time we also tracked 250 other blog entries that came from 1 domain name, but this time the link was placed as part of the standard template design. Our tracking revealed that 249 of those blog pages were ignored. Google only paid attention to the link on the blog's home page.
The bottom line of today's Daly Golden Nugget is to kill the keyword clouds and link from the body of your blog entry to your main website.
