How to use content strategy to make your blog a success. Using a blog to help a website perform better.

1. Tonight, we have
World Domination By Blog
David Rosam: Writing For SEO & Web Positioning Centre

2. I’m going to cover a lot of ground
this evening

3. I don’t presume to teach you:
• The last word about:
• SEO
• Online strategy
• Copywriting
• Webmastering

4. I will give you a lot of pointers to
help you towards world
domination by blog

5. Why are blogs so important in
2013?

6. Google

7. A particular view of Google
• Tries to make the Net a better quality place
• Tries to stop SEOs and Webmasters from cheating
• Tries to penalise junk sites
• Panda and Penguin updates
• Continuous algorithm tweaks

8. Used properly, your blog helps you
keep Google happy
• Google has always liked lots of good
quality content
• It lurves it now

9. Your blog is a brilliant delivery
mechanism for great content

10. So we just write a load of good
stuff and Google will love us?

11. Nope!

12. Welcome to the wilderness

13. You’re stumbling around
• How easily will you get to your destination without a map?
• Isn’t that just what you’re doing by creating content aimlessly?

14. Content isn’t King
• Content, alone, is an indulgence
• Content needs to be a team player
• It needs some support

15. If Content is a team player,
Strategy is the coach
• Content needs a purpose
• Content needs a vision
• Content needs to work for you
• And, to work for you, it needs to work for your readers

16. But, enough of the Dodgy
Analogies

17. What to you have to do to make
your blog successful?

18. Start by asking a difficult question

19. What is your blog for?

20. I came up with these answers for
Writing For SEO
• To attract new clients
• To act as a platform to develop and deliver products
• To share my expertise with more people (sorry if that sounds a bit
yucky, but there it is)

21. Yours may be
• To attract more natural/organic search traffic
• To interact more closely with your customers and prospects, your
community
• Supporting a local, hobby or sporting group - it doesn’t have to be to
make a profit, or even work within a business context
• Another way of putting this is to define your niche. You shouldn’t try
to be everything to everybody

22. Find out what your audience is
searching on
• Google Key Word Tool (http://www.googlekeywordtool.com/) tells
you a lot
• Key phrases you haven’t thought about
• How popular a key phrase is (how many searches are being made on
it)
• There are loads of other tools out there, too - free and paid

23. What’s the competition?
• Not ‘Who’s the competition?’
• On the Web, I don’t care who my competitors are, I want to know
what I need to do push them off the first page of Google

24. Take a look at the competition for
the key phrases you need
• Try:
• Web SEO Analytics (www.webseoanalytics.com)
• SEOmoz (www.seomoz.org)

25. Put your key phrases into a
spreadsheet
• Sort on search numbers
• Sort or filter on difficulty
• Filter on particular words
• Explore to see what themes there are for
your content

26. Put a content strategy in place
• Theme key phrases for Pages on your blog
• Do the themes suggest Categories for your blog?
• Use the key phrases you’ve discovered to suggest blog posts
• You’re ensuring what you produce will appeal to people and presented
in an easy-to-digest way

27. Use an EMD as a WMD
• Exact Match Domains
• A domain that reflects an important
key phrase - like WritingForSEO.org
• A favourite tool for spammy affiliate
sites
• Google said it was outlawing them
• But it hasn’t

28. Choose your EMD
• Find a high-traffic key phrase that applies to your site
• Search for available domains
• If you have a UK customer base, a .co.uk domain is a good thing
• So you’ll end up with agoodkeyphraseformyblog.co.uk

29. Choose a blog platform
• If you want a personal blog, choose Blogger or WordPress.com
• If you want to do business, make money or put a blog on an existing
site, use your own WordPress install
• Flexibility
• Ownership of data
• Use your own domain (you can with Blogger, too)

30. Using a blog to help a site’s
performance
• Don’t put the blog on a different domain -
www.yourdomain.wordpress won’t help the site at
www.yourdomain.com
• Don’t put your blog on a separate subdomain - Google treats
blog.yourdomain.com as completely separate from
www.yourdomain.com
• Do put your blog at www.yourdomain.com/blog/

31. With your strategy, domain and
hosting in place, you can create
content

32. Writing your content
• Go for substance rather than frequency
• Post every day if you can, but don’t worry about it if you can’t
• Include at least one image, because it makes your post look less
daunting
• Put together a schedule, and try to stick to it
• Monitor page popularity, social mentions and links

33. Give your content leverage
• Use your key phrases in headings, title tag and keyword tag
• Don’t go mad with key phrases
• Make sure you’re writing for your audience and Google in mind, not
just Google

34. Build some links
• Social bookmarking sites:
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Reddit
• Guest blogging
• Forum and blog comments

35. Social media
• Don’t spend all your time on social media
• Content production is more important
• I suggest a presence on Twitter and Google+
• Plus either Facebook or LinkedIn

36. Measure your results
• You can find where you’ve got with Analytics - Google Analytics is free
and very powerful
• Also install Google Webmaster Tools
• Link to Google Analytics
• Keep on measuring

37. Do all these things as best you can
• Online success is about doing as many things as possible well, rather
than one or two perfectly
• Don’t cheat or automate
• Give your readers what they want

38. You can fill many of the gaps by
looking on my website
www.writingforseo.org

39. David Rosam
• Web www.writingforseo.org
• Twitter @writingforseo
• Google+ www.writingforseo.org/
googleplus
• Telephone +44 (0)1273 906607
• E-mail david@writingforseo.org
• LinkedIn www.writingforseo/linkedin
• Facebook www.facebook.com/
writingforseo
• Also www.webpositioningcentre.co.uk
• Please see Writing For SEO for image
acknowledgements