• Part 1: SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs: Introduction — In this article, I covered the basics of SEO in the context of factors/signals that tell search engines what your blog and your articles are about.
• Part 2: Getting Started with SEO & Hyperlocal Blogs — In this article, I covered several SEO considerations that are important before a new blogger writes his/her first blog post, such as choosing a blog platform, choosing a domain and blog name, URL permalinks, and much more.
• Part 3: On-site SEO: How to Optimize Your Blog Posts — In this article, I got detailed about SEO optimization for individual articles and blog posts, from keyword research to optimizing headlines and page titles, internal linking, and more.
• Part 4: Ongoing SEO Tactics for Hyperlocal Blogs — In this article, I covered additional blog SEO tactics including topic pages, link building, and using analytics.
• Part 5: SEO Final Steps: Content Promotion for Local Blogs — In this article, I explain the importance of promoting your blog/content in online channels such as social media, as well as offline promotion opportunities, too.

Thanks to all who read through the whole series. More thanks to those who read and left valuable comments on any of the articles. And perhaps the most thanks to those who encouraged me to write the series in the first place, way back in April when I asked you.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Hyperlocal Blog SEO: The Series

You may have a terrific local blog — and I hope you do! — but no matter how good it is, you’re making a mistake if you think that just writing good local content with all the right SEO tactics is automatically going to bring in loads of new visitors. No matter how great your content is, you still have to promote it in other places.

I’m stretching the definition of SEO here, but we’re still talking about increasing readership and that’s the bottom line. Here’s a list of online and offline ways to promote your content.

Online Content Marketing

Facebook
As much as I dislike Facebook, there’s no denying its popularity nor the fact that it could be a great venue for increasing awareness of your hyperlocal blog. Pages are the primary tool that Facebook offers for this kind of thing. If you’re ready to create a page for your local blog, here’s where to start.

Although I’m hardly an expert on Facebook, Cari and I have setup Facebook pages for all four of our local blogs. We post links to our blog articles, have local photo albums, and sections for local event listings and discussions. Our pages are new and we don’t have a ton of activity on any of them right now. But, if you want to see what we’re doing, here are the pages:

• Richland Real Estate Blog on Facebook
• Pasco Real Estate Blog on Facebook
• Kennewick Real Estate Blog on Facebook
• West Richland Real Estate Blog on Facebook

Rather than relying on what we’re doing as a guide, you might want to read these excellent articles about Facebook pages and promotion.

• How to Use Facebook for Business and Marketing by Tamar Weinberg
• How to Build Engaging One-of-Kind Facebook Fan Pages by Orli Yakuel
• How To Quickly Customize Your Facebook Page To Attract More Fans by Greg Finn

Twitter
At some point, Cari and I may follow the same path and create separate Twitter accounts for each blog; but at the moment, I don’t think that’s smart for us. There’s not a ton of local Twitter users in our area, and I don’t think any such account would get many followers. (Our Facebook pages don’t have many “likes” yet, either.) So, for now, I’m posting links to some of our local blog articles via my Twitter account. In a larger city, though, I’d think that you would want to separate your personal Twitter account from your blog’s account.

YouTube
YouTube is the second-largest search engine on the planet — it gets more searches than Yahoo and Bing. If you’re creating video content — and why wouldn’t you be? — you should be sharing it on YouTube. Three quick suggestions:

1. Setup an account specifically for your blog; don’t use your personal account. People may want to subscribe to your blog videos, but not your personal ones.

2. Be sure to mention your blog name and URL in the descriptions of your videos so people can learn who the source is when they find your videos.

3. Be sure to promote your YouTube channel on your blog, so that any heavy YouTube users know that they can subscribe to your channel and see your videos when they visit YouTube.

Flickr
If you’re taking photos for your blog — and again, why wouldn’t you be? — Flickr is a great place to upload and share them. Again, you’ll need to decide if you want to use a personal Flickr account or create one specifically for your blog. Either way, when you share photos on Flickr, be sure to link to the blog post that’s related to the photo (if there is one).

Also, do a search in Flickr’s Groups section to see if there’s a specific group for your town or neighborhood. I bet there is — at least at the town level. Join that group and get involved in any interesting discussions that are happening (or start some yourself). Share your photos with the group. This is a great way to get your target audience to learn about your blog.

outside.in
I’ve written about outside.in many times before, so this is probably not new to anyone. In a nutshell, you can add your blog into outside.in’s system to increase exposure. Your blog posts will show up on outside.in itself, and may show up on its partners’ sites, like local media outlets and even CNN.

Offline Content Promotion

You can use pretty much any “traditional” marketing to promote your blog. In a smaller town like mine, there’s a chance these will be more successful than some online promotion methods. Here are some worth considering:

• Make a print edition of your blog and distribute it around town
• Advertise your blog URL on t-shirts or other pieces of clothing
• Make special business cards just for your local blog
• Bumper stickers, pens, and other product promotion ideas
• Signs/flyers posted on local bulletin boards (like at the grocery store)
• Advertise locally, like sponsoring a Little League team
• etc.

When it comes to offline blog/content promotion, the possibilities are almost endless.

Summary

This wraps up my five-part series on SEO for hyperlocal blogs. If you didn’t know what SEO was, I hope you learned a lot and have a better idea of how to start optimizing your blog for search engine visibility. If you already knew something about SEO, I hope I shared at least a few new ideas you weren’t aware of or clarified some things you weren’t sure of.

Either way, don’t ignore SEO. I don’t think it should be your primary concern in creating local blog content, but I do think it’s smart to use SEO to introduce your blog to new readers — people who are looking for local information via Google, Bing, or Yahoo and didn’t know that your blog existed.

As always, if you have any comments or questions about this article or the series as a whole, the comments are open.

(This was the last of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites.)

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

SEO Final Steps: Content Promotion for Local Blogs

In the last article, we went through a list of SEO tactics that apply to a single blog post. In this article, we’ll cover a variety of SEO tactics that can boost your hyperlocal blog as a whole; these are things I recommend you do on an ongoing, regular basis to help search engines better understand the value and content of your blog and posts.

Internal Linking

I mentioned this at the end of the previous article, but there’s more you can do to boost the internal linking on your local blog. Here are a few:

Link Recap Posts
On my SEO blog, I do link recap posts every month. Here’s an example of a recent “Flashback” post where I link back to the best articles from the previous year. Other blogs do this more often; Lifehacker, for example, does weekly roundups linking back to their most popular posts (like this one), most popular downloads, and so forth.

Link recap posts are good for two reasons:

• They provide another in-article link to your previous posts. This encourages further spidering of your blog posts and gives them a little more internal “link juice.”
• They’re good for readers who may have missed your previous content for some reason.

Anything that’s good for readers and search engines is a win-win in my book.

Related Posts
Showing related posts on each of your articles serves essentially the same purpose as I described above regarding Link Recap Posts. When you reach the end of any articles here on Hyperlocal Blogger, you should see 1 to 4 related posts. Those are created by a WordPress plugin called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

YARPP requires a little bit of setup at the start, and you should plan on tweaking the settings until it starts showing the best possible old posts. You can also customize the display, which is very cool.

Make a “Best Posts” Category
The main benefit here is actually for readers. When someone new comes to your blog, you can do them (and you) a big favor by giving them quick access to the best local content you’ve written. It’ll help them learn immediately what you’re capable of and why they should keep reading.

The SEO benefit here is, again, additional internal linking to your old posts. But much more than that, showcasing your best content increases the chance that others will link to your old posts. If you have an in-depth interview with a local official about an important neighborhood topic, the easier others can find that interview, the more likely they’ll be to link to it.

Link Building

In addition to writing great content, it’s smart to do what you can to acquire more inbound links (from other sites/blogs) on an ongoing basis. In the SEO world, link building is one of the many things that you don’t just do once and stop.

It’s impossible to sum up link building in just a couple paragraphs here. So let me link to a couple resources you should read for further information:

• The Ultimate Guide to Building the Perfect Link — This is an article I wrote in early 2007, but don’t let the age bother you. There’s a lot of explanation here about the different types of links (one-way, reciprocal, etc.) and which ones are most helpful for SEO.
• SEMMY Awards: Link Building — For three years, I’ve been organizing an annual awards for SEO-related content. This link points to the archives for the Link Building category, so you’ll find all kinds of great articles in there.
• (Now) 43 Local Blog Directories — I’ve been keeping this running list of local blog directories; these are places you can submit your blog for exposure and inbound links. In fact, you may want to browse the Promotion category here on Hyperlocal Blogger.

I’ll add this little piece of advice: If and when you find a blogger or web site owner in your area who’s very generous in giving out links, try to make friends with that person. It may help you get more links. (For example, now that I’ve been doing the “Hyperlocal News Roundup” posts for several months here on HLB, some readers have struck up email conversations with me, and those relationships are now at the point where they don’t mind emailing me links to their content for possible inclusion in my roundups.)

Analytics

An entire post … heck, an entire series of posts could be written about the importance of analytics to a hyperlocal blog (or any blog, for that matter). By using analytics, you’ll quickly learn how people search for local content and, when you know that, you’ll become a smarter and better writer who’s able to target content both for readers and search engines.

What analytics software to use?
There are several choices for web analytics, but Google Analytics is what I always recommend to clients and what I use on our own blogs. It’s free and it provides more than enough information for bloggers. Some bloggers like to use SiteMeter and Google Analytics together, because SiteMeter provides some extra data about specific visits.

What analytics to watch?
Here’s a very general answer: I would think that most bloggers would want to closely watch:

• How much traffic comes from search — if you’re doing SEO well, the traffic you get from search engines should rise consistently or, if it’s already high, should remain steady.
• What keywords drive traffic — I’m not exaggerating when I say that my approach to blogging has changed because of what I’ve learned about how people search and what they search for.
• How people search for local content — and more specifically, do they search using city names? Neighborhoods? Something else?

What to do with your analytics data
As I’ve suggested above, you can — you should — use your analytics data to drive some of your blog content. It should help you a) get ideas for new content, and b) give you ideas for modifying old content.

Topic Pages

One last item for this post about ongoing SEO, and it’s a reminder of something I wrote about previously: Topic Pages. These are useful when you find yourself blogging repeatedly about a single topic, like an annual event in your town. As I described in that previous post, the problem is that your old blog posts will be the ones that rank well in search engines and people will click through to your blog, only to land on outdated info. You can make a habit of manually linking from all of those old posts to the most current one, but that’s a lot of work.

A better idea is to create a Topic Page that uses a single URL every year, or every month, or however often the topic comes up. You update that Topic Page with all the new info, and then link to it as you write new blog posts about the event. Read the blog post I mentioned for more details about this powerful SEO tactic for local blogs.

Summary & Preview

SEO doesn’t begin and end when you write a blog post; it’s an ongoing process, and this article introduces some things you can do on a regular basis to continue growing your blog’s overall authority and trust.

Next week, I’ll stretch the definition of SEO a bit to include general blog/content promotion. As many great bloggers have learned, great content doesn’t get popular on its own; you have to promote it to increase visibility, attract links, and so forth. Look for that article next week.

In the meantime, if you have questions or comments about this article or the series in general, the comments are open.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Ongoing SEO Tactics for Hyperlocal Blogs

In the first two articles of this series, we’ve introduced SEO and covered some of the most important SEO decisions that should be thought about before you start blogging. In this article, we’ll assume you’ve addressed those issues, your blog is setup correctly, and you’re ready to start writing. Before you actually put fingers to keyboard, though, here’s what you need to know about optimizing your blog and your blog content.

First, a disclaimer: When it comes to writing individual blog posts, I don’t really care about SEO 100% of the time. Some of the blog posts I write (on all of my blogs, not just the hyperlocal ones) don’t need SEO; some are written fully for my readers and I don’t care or expect them to ever rank well in search engine results. So, please understand that, when I talk about optimizing an individual blog post, I realize you may not need to do that on everything you publish. With that in mind, let’s get started.

Keyword Research

Keyword research helps you understand what people search for at Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and how they search — the words they use. This is important because it helps you write the best headlines and blog posts possible.

Example: You might write a really great blog post about tourist attractions in your hometown — let’s say you live in Portland — and your headline is “Top Tourist Attractions in Portland.” And in your blog post, you use that phrase a few times more because you want your article to rank well when people search for “tourist attractions in portland” and phrases like that.

If you had done some keyword research, though, you would’ve learned that many more people search for “things to do in portland” than for “tourist attractions portland.” Have a look:

As you can see, more people are searching for “things to do” in Portland, so your post would have a chance at more search engine traffic if you had used that phrase, instead.

How to Research Keywords
There are a number of keyword research tools online: Some are free, some aren’t, and some have both paid and free options. Here’s a quick list of places you can do some keyword research:

• Keyword Discovery — as of this writing, offers a free trial as well as paid options
• Wordtracker — ditto
• WordStream — ditto
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool — free, may soon be changing to a new URL
• Google’s Search-based keyword tool — free
• Wordtracker Keyword Questions — cool tool that shows what questions people ask on search engines; great way to get content ideas; Keyword Discovery offers a similar product
• Google Insights for Search — free, lets you see keyword trends based on geography

That last one could be especially important for local bloggers since you can see data from specific cities and regions.

Important: When doing keyword research, don’t worry about the exact numbers you’ll see; focus instead on the relative popularity and trends of certain keywords.

SEO for Blog Posts/Articles

Let’s move ahead on the assumption that you know the words you’ll want to include in your blog post, and you’re ready to start writing.

Optimizing Article Headlines
The most important on-page SEO signal is the page title, also known as the “title tag.” In WordPress, and in other blog platforms I presume, the headline you use for your article also becomes part of the page title. The page title also becomes the large, clickable link when your content shows up in search engine results, like this

The headline of that article is “Planning A Hyperlocal Blog Strategy.” It also became the page title; thus, it also shows as the clickable link in Google (and Yahoo, Bing, etc.). It’s very important that you include your primary keyword(s) in the headline of your article, and also try to write your headline in such a way that it will catch a searcher’s eyes and make him/her want to click the link on Google.

How to Optimize Article Headlines
The default WordPress installation will make your page title show up with the blog name first, followed by the article headline. Like this:

Blog Title : Article Headline

That’s generally not good for SEO. You want your headline to appear first in the page title. There are several WordPress plugins that will let you change the order, such as All in One SEO Pack or SEO Title Tag (and others).

Some plugins will let you customize the page title so it says whatever you want. This can be a very handy and effective way to target multiple terms — one in your article headline and another in the page title. For example, a couple years ago on my other blog, I wrote an article that I targeted toward the phrases “reputation management” and “small business.” The article headline is Why Reputation Management Matters for Small Businesses, but I used a plugin to write a custom page title. I switched around the order of those keywords, so that the page title is “Small Business Reputation Management: Why It Matters.” And here’s how it looks in Google’s search results:

As you can see, I targeted two versions of the primary keyword — one with the visible article headline and the other with a custom page title. This is an effective way to optimize your posts to target similar keywords.

Optimizing Article URLs
The URL is another signal that search engines use to learn what a page/article is about. Google has written about the benefits of short URLs. Search engines and humans both prefer shorter URLs over really long ones with a lot of hyphens and words. WordPress makes it easy to optimize your URLs before publishing:

Just click that “Edit” button and you’ll be able to rewrite the URL however you want. My advice is to eliminate as many unnecessary words as possible and leave the primary keywords, like I did in that reputation management post I mentioned above. See how the URL (in green) consists only of the primary keywords:

You should do the same with your hyperlocal blog posts.

Meta Tags
You can ignore the keywords meta tag completely. No search engine uses it. But you may want to spend some time on the meta description tag; it doesn’t have any impact on rankings, but it may show up as the snippet of text below your listing on a search results page. A good snippet can encourage searchers to click through and visit your blog.

But the description tag won’t always be used as the snippet — it depends on the search query and other factors. In the reputation management example above, you’ll notice that I did write a custom meta description tag, but I don’t do that with all my posts. I’m often happy to let Google pull some text from the article itself to show as the snippet.

If you use WordPress, there are a variety of plugins that will let you write custom meta description tags.

Optimizing the Post (e.g., Keyword Density)
The first rule of writing blog articles should always be to focus on writing for humans. Your copy has to be readable and understandable. At the same time, you should include keywords in the article to help search engines understand what you’re writing about. But you don’t want to overdo this. There’s no such thing as a perfect keyword density. Don’t worry about counting how many times you use a certain keyword. Instead, read your post aloud before you publish — you should be able to tell if you’ve overdone it or not. Mention your keywords but don’t overdo it.

Optimizing Images
A striking image can help your articles succeed on social networks; people regularly share content that includes a unique or interesting photo. But images can also help with SEO. Here are a couple quick tips related to using images in your blog posts:

1. Use the keyword in the file name of your image, like main-keyword.jpg.
2. Use the keyword in the ALT text of the image, but don’t overdo it.
3. If your blog template supports captions, use the keyword in the caption of your image. If not, it helps to have the keywords appear in close proximity to your image — again, without spamming/overdoing it.

Internal Linking
I’ve explained already that the anchor text of links are a strong SEO signal, and this includes internal links — these are links on your blog that point to other pages/articles on your blog. For example, when I link to my old article with the phrase legal resources for bloggers, it helps that article rank for the keyword phrase I used in the link — the anchor text.

Use internal links (to your old blog posts) generously, but don’t overdo it. No one likes to read an article where every third word is a link back to some old article. Do it when it makes sense for your readers, but use keywords in the anchor text of those internal links to help search engines associate the old article(s) with the correct keywords.

Summary & Preview

Chances are that you won’t care about SEO with every post/article you write. But when you do, it’s important to make sure you’re using the right keywords and that you’ve optimized your post headline and the page title. You can also optimize the post URL, images, internal links, and the other things listed above to help with SEO.

Optimizing individual blog posts is just the beginning, though. There are a variety of things you can do to further optimize your blog for long-term trust and authority. In the next article, I’ll share some ideas for ongoing blog SEO. Look for that article next week.

In the meantime, if you have comments or questions about this article or the series so far, the comments are open.

(This was the third of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites. Future editions will be published on the next two Mondays.)

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

On-site SEO: How to Optimize Your Blog Posts

One of the common mistakes business owners make is waiting until after their web site is developed and launched to think about SEO; it needs to be taken into account during the site design and development process.

Similarly, a hyperlocal blogger should be thinking about SEO from day one. Here’s a look at several SEO considerations you should decide on long before any blog posts are written and published. If you’re already an established blogger, many of these ideas and tips can still be applied.

Your Blog Platform

WordPress is a very SEO-friendly blog platform in its own right; the availability of plugins to further optimize a WordPress blog makes it almost a no-brainer to use WordPress as your blog platform of choice. I would avoid Blogger at all costs for a variety of reasons, one of which is that it doesn’t provide nearly the same opportunity for SEO success as WordPress does. There are other options that, to be frank, I’m not as familiar with — content management systems like Drupal and Joomla, as well as hyperlocal platforms like Neighborlogs. If you choose to investigate these options, be sure to compare the SEO capabilities to WordPress when reviewing the other pros and cons of each platform.

Your Domain and Blog Name

If you haven’t chosen a domain yet, I’d strongly recommend you find a domain with the name of your city, town, neighborhood — whatever geographic area you cover. The domain name and name of your blog are both signals to search engines of what your blog is about. And keep in mind what I said in part one about anchor text: As others link to your blog, they’ll likely use your blog name and/or URL as the anchor text. If you have your city name in the domain and blog name, that will lead to a lot of good anchor text and your blog will be more likely to rank highly for phrases that have your city name.

Your Blog URL

Many local bloggers will use a distinct domain name, such as WestSeattleBlog.com or MonroeScoop.com. That’s generally the best way to go if you’re just starting from scratch with a new blog/site.

But some might choose or need to attach a hyperlocal blog to an existing web site. This advice is for bloggers in that situation.

Best: Setup your blog in a subdirectory of the existing site, such as yourdomain.com/blog. This is best because all links to your blog will also benefit the main domain/site.

Okay: If you must, it’s okay to setup the blog on a subdomain, such as blog.yourdomain.com. This is not ideal for SEO because the main domain will benefit less from inbound links, but it’s not the end of the world.

Somewhere in between: A third option for bloggers with existing sites is to setup the blog on a completely separate domain. This is what my wife and I did in 2008 when we setup our four hyperlocal blogs. Cari already had a general real estate blog at blog.carimcgee.com (now at www.carimcgee.com/category/blog/), and we specifically wanted to target new blogs to each of the four main cities in our area: Richland, Kennewick, Pasco, and West Richland. Most people don’t setup four blogs at a time, so this was a unique situation. We chose to use separate domains, in part, for SEO reasons.

• Pros of our decision: With each blog, we’re able to target specific keywords for each individual city. We also get the benefits mentioned above about having a blog’s name and domain that use the name of the city. While search rankings always fluctuate, our blogs have generally ranked well and get a fair amount of search traffic. (As an SEO, I’ll always think we could do better!)
• Cons of our decision: It’s much more time-consuming to manage four separate blogs, much more time-consuming to worry about SEO for multiple blogs, to setup Facebook pages for each blog, etc. Think about it: Everything you do on your one blog, we have to do four times over. It can be a pain in the arse to say the least.

Important: If you have an existing and established blog, I would probably not recommend you change the domain or URL setup. Doing so is like starting from scratch, even if you correctly setup a 301 redirect from your old domain to a new one. In the SEO world, changing domains or URL structures on an existing, established site is usually just asking for a big headache.

Permalinks

In WordPress, you can and should customize what your URLs look like. I don’t know how other blog platforms handle this, so I’ll be speaking to the process WordPress uses. In your Admin area, go to Settings >> Permalinks. WordPress will default a new blog installation to use date-based URLs, like this:

http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com/2010/05/20/post-title/

For SEO reasons, you want to do it differently. Choose “Custom” and then input /%postname%/ in the text field. Here’s a screenshot of how it looks for this blog:

This will remove the date from your URLs and you’ll have nice, clean URLs like this:

http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com/post-title/

Both users and search engines prefer short, descriptive URLs, and this is the best way to accomplish that during your blog setup. There’s more you can do with your URLs when writing individual blog posts, and I’ll cover that in the next article in this series.

Categories or Tags

In WordPress, you’ll be able to structure your blog with categories, tags, or both. Making this decision requires you to look into the future a bit and imagine what your blog will look like in six months or a year. Here are my thoughts on that decision:

Categories: This is my preferred method for hyperlocal blogs because it creates an opportunity to target strong keywords as categories. On all of our blogs, we use a similar set of categories: Business, Schools, Events, Real Estate, News, etc. So, our category pages look like this:

• Richland Events
• Kennewick Business
• Pasco Schools

Notice how, in each case, we have a good keyword in the name of the page, in the anchor text of inbound links, and in the URLs, too. I chose to use Categories at the beginning because I looked ahead and envisioned us writing consistently on certain topics; those became the categories.

Tags: I use tags, not categories, on my personal blog, MattMcGee.com. I did this purely as a test. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Even when you don’t use categories, WordPress will default all your posts into the “Miscellaneous” category that it requires to function. So, you get categories even when you don’t want them.
2. It’s very difficult to keep track of all the different tags you’ve used on previous blog posts. On my blog, for example, I’ve used “photo” as a tag, and “photos” as a separate tag. I don’t remember if I did that on purpose, but I do remember having to go in to my blog admin and clean it all up. Tags open up the door for a messy blog structure.

Both: I’ve never done both on a blog, but this seems like a recipe for disaster. You’ll end up with tag pages that duplicate your category pages, or vice versa. I’d highly recommend against this, but if any readers want to make a case that it works, feel free to do so in the comments.

Blog Comments

This isn’t so much an SEO issue as it is a spam-management issue. And if you don’t manage spam on your blog, then it can become an SEO problem. I’m a big believer in allowing comments on a blog with as little moderation as possible. But a completely free and open commenting system will eventually attract all kinds of spam, and you’ll end up wasting a lot of time deleting spammy comments. My suggestion: Require commenters to have their first comment manually approved. This will keep probably 95% of all spam comments off your blog; you can zap them before anyone sees them.

Web Analytics

This is a must. Web analytics are a great tool to help you learn SEO and improve your blog. A good analytics program will help you understand

• what blog posts were the most successful,
• what keywords and phrases bring people to your blog
• where your visitors come from
• what other web sites and blogs send you the most traffic (including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter)
• much, much more

Before you launch your blog, make sure you’ve setup some web analytics software to track what happens after you launch. Google Analytics should be plenty good enough for most local bloggers.

Google Webmaster Tools

It’s also a good idea to connect your blog to Google’s Webmaster Tools. This is a suite of products that helps you understand how Google sees your site. And with Google owning about 70% of the search market, it’s good to know how Google sees your site.

Technical SEO Considerations

There are many technical considerations where SEO is concerned, but most are outside the scope of this series and many aren’t too applicable to hyperlocal bloggers using one of the main blog platforms. But there are two things I’d like to address:

Domains: www or non-www?
When setting up your hosting account, you’ll probably be asked to choose whether you want your blog to be reachable at www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com (without the www), or both. The only wrong choice here is “both.” Choose either to use “www” or not use it, and then make sure the other option uses a 301 redirect to hit your domain. In other words, if you use the “www” version, there should be a 301 redirect setup on yourdomain.com to automatically send visitors to www.yourdomain.com. Chances are good that your web host takes care of this for you during account setup, but you should double-check.

XML Sitemaps are not necessary
If you look, you’ll find a lot of advice telling you that XML sitemaps are a must for SEO; that’s not true. I’ve never once created an XML sitemap for any of my blogs or web sites, and these sites are not having any trouble where SEO is concerned. A strong blog that regularly publishes quality content and attracts a lot of inbound links will have no trouble getting its content spidered and indexed — the two main benefits of an XML sitemap.

XML sitemaps are generally not a bad thing, although I’m aware of two occasions — one involving a client — where Google stopped crawling/indexing blog content and it was only after we removed the XML sitemap that things improved.

Summary & Preview

There are a number of important SEO-related decisions that should be made long before you start writing blog posts. But even if you have an existing blog, many of the above tips still apply: setup analytics if you haven’t already; use Google Webmaster Tools; keep comment spam off your blog, etc.

In the next article, we’ll dig deep into your blog’s content and how to optimize it with SEO best practices in mind. I’ll talk about keyword research and usage, writing headlines, customizing URLs, and much more. Look for that article next week.

In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments on this article or the series so far, the comments are open.

(This was the second of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites. Future editions will be published on the next three Mondays.)

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Getting Started with SEO & Hyperlocal Blogs

Most SEO basics are the same from one site to the next and one industry to the next. Optimizing page titles, building links, etc., are important for everyone, for example. But blogging — and hyperlocal blogging in particular — carries with it some unique challenges and opportunities.

In this series, I’ll cover both the basics of SEO in general, as well as the specifics as they apply to hyperlocal blogging. But first, for readers who find this without having read Hyperlocal Blogger before, a little background about me.

Who are you?
I’ve been doing SEO since about 1999/2000, much longer than I’ve been a local blogger. I’ve done SEO consulting for large companies like Target and The Weather Channel, as well as small businesses like a dermatologist in northern California and a mom and pop selling things online from their garage. I’m a regular speaker at SEO/marketing conferences and have been interviewed by a variety of traditional media outlets. You can learn more about me on my SEO blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SEO Basics

What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that involves tweaking your web site (optimizing it) for maximum visibility in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I call it a “process” because SEO is an ongoing thing, not something you do once and forget about. And for me and many SEO professionals, it’s about more than just search engine rankings. It’s a process that targets two audiences: search engines and humans.

A search engine wants to know two main things about web pages:

1. what the page is about, and
2. how important/valuable the page is

SEO is about knowing how to make both of those things obvious to search engines, while simultaneously creating value for human visitors to your site. In that sense, SEO is both an art and a science.

What’s the goal?
The goal of SEO — indeed, of any kind of marketing — is to create trust. You want search engines to learn to trust your blog as an authority in your area. When they do, your blog posts will rank highly in search results and you should get more traffic to your blog. You also want human visitors to trust your blog as an authority in your area. When they do, they’ll visit more often, they’ll bookmark your blog, they’ll spread your content on their favorite social networks, they’ll link to your blog posts and recommend your blog to others who live in your area. Both search engines and humans reward trusted sites and blogs. Good SEO helps you create that trust.

SEO Factors

Search engine algorithms are exceptionally complicated and change on a regular basis. Google says it uses more than 200 factors in determining how to rank pages, and it makes hundreds of changes to its algorithm every year. No one outside of the search engines knows the exact formula, but we know there are some very important signals that influence how your blog is seen by search engines and how it earns trust.

Signals You Control
As a blogger, you control many of the signals that search engines rely on, such as:

• the name of your blog
• the categories or tags you use
• the titles of your blog posts
• the content of your blog posts
• even the alt text you use on images can serve as a small signal for search engines
• some links to your blog, such as links you get from blog directories and other local directory sites
• internal links you create — links on your blog to other pages/articles on your blog, like the link I’ve just created on the phrase “blog directories”

Signals You Don’t Control
There are some signals that you don’t control, but still serve to tell a search engine what your blog is about and how important it is, such as:

• links to your blog from other sites/blogs, and the “anchor text” of those links
• what other sites/blogs say about your blog when writing about it and/or citing your content
• social media sharing of your content
• feed subscriptions
• click-thru data in Google & Google Blog Search

Of this list, the first two signals tend to carry much greater significance than the rest. Inbound links to your blog, in particular, are a very strong SEO signal. The quantity of inbound links is important, but the quality of inbound links matters even more. Links to your blog from highly trusted and locally relevant sites, for example, would be a very strong signal in your favor. The anchor text of links is also extremely important. In the previous paragraph, I used the anchor text “blog directories” for the link to an old blog post. That tells search engines that the page I’m linking to is about blog directories. If enough quality, trusted sites link to that article with the same anchor text, it has a chance to rank highly for the phrase “blog directories.”

The other three signals are likely to play a small role, too. Consider that Google owns the number one RSS feed syndication service, the number one feed reader, and has mountains of search and click-thru data from its users; it would be silly for them to completely ignore such obvious signs of popularity and value.

Summary & Preview

That’s a semi-brief introduction to the basic concepts of SEO. If nothing else, keep in mind that your goal as a blogger is to make it obvious (via various signals) to search engines what your posts are about and why they have value, while at the same time writing for human visitors.

In part two of this series, I’ll talk about the importance of doing SEO on your blog long before you begin writing posts and share tips for setting up your blog for the best long-term SEO success. Look for that article next week.

In the meantime, if you have questions or comments on this article, the comments are open.

(This was the first of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites. Future editions will be published on the next four Mondays.)

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs: Introduction

But this really makes me angry: The inside scoop: What’s new for newspapers?

It’s an editorial published today by my local paper, the Tri-City Herald, and written after a visit by the CEO of McClatchy Newspapers, the paper’s owners. The visit apparently was all about the future of newspapers and probably included some kind of pep talk for the troops. And the paper turned that talk into an editorial that compares online news, bloggers, and everyone else to the BP oil spill. Here’s some of what the Herald published:

The internet is great. But it’s a gusher — not unlike the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Once you get it started, there’s just no shutoff valve … and no filter … and no retraction button.

And once it’s on the web, those rumors become a lot more believable for a lot of people. “I read it on the internet” is the new excuse for just about everything.

But buyer beware. It is often impossible to know if anyone has verified the material that’s on the internet or whether anyone is held responsible for rumors, misinformation or outright libel.

That uncertainty is working in newspapers’ favor. People are turning to newspaper websites as a trusted source.

Certainly, we’re guilty of sins of commission and omission — but our mistakes are made in the context of striving to present a complete and accurate report of events.

We have plenty of detractors, and hear from them regularly, but newspaper websites dominate internet traffic in virtually every market — usually attracting 70 percent of the audience or better.

It makes sense. Aside from credibility issues, few bloggers have the resources that a newsroom commands. There are serious journalists in the blogosphere, of course, but without newspaper reporters gathering facts and publishing first-hand accounts, few bloggers would have anything to talk about.

For all the painful changes at the nation’s newspapers, no one else reports on the communities we serve with the same depth.

It takes a newsroom to cover the city council meetings, disseminate the police logs, follow the court case and file the open records requests.

That’s the sound of a scared newspaper. Let’s look at some of these claims:

1.) The Internet is like the BP oil spill. Oh, grow up, Herald. The problem is that your day-late print publication can’t keep up with the speed of news that the Internet facilitates. It makes you obsolete. And you, with your annual cutting of thousands of trees, are a lot closer to the environmental damage happening in the Gulf than any online news outlet.

2.) It’s impossible to verify material online. It’s no more difficult to verify online news than it is to verify what you publish. On our real estate blog, I just broke the news that Charter Cable has bought out the local cable company; big news in our little town (that you still haven’t reported). And to help people verify the news, I scanned and posted the complete letter we received from Charter. What tools do you give me in your articles to help verify them? But all news should be read with a critical eye, whether it comes from a newspaper or a local blog. In fact, I dare say that if someone were to verify the news you print … they’d go online to do it. Jealous, perhaps?

3.) Our mistakes are made in trying to present a complete and accurate report. Yes, like when you completely failed to report that Dino Rossi, a well-known Republican who twice this decade came close to winning the governor’s seat, had declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate. You didn’t publish a correction the following day (to my knowledge), but an online news site would’ve quite easily amended such a mistake by posting the news when a reader like me asked about it.

4.) Newspaper web sites dominate Internet traffic with 70 percent of the audience or better. And how am I supposed to verify a stat like that when you don’t bother sharing a source? Online bloggers would’ve linked to their source.

5.) Without newspapers, few bloggers would have anything to talk about. Oh, KMA Herald. Your reporters use the Internet for research as much as anyone. Here’s a study that says 89% of journalists use blogs for research. (Notice how I included a link there so you can verify the datum?) And if you’re complaining that local bloggers steal your stories, remember that goes both ways. (Another link for verification!)

6.) It takes a newsroom to [cover local news]. I don’t run a local news blog, but I know a lot of people who do. And they do it from their homes just fine, thank you. In Seattle, they do it so well that the Seattle Times has been partnering for about a year with several local news blogs to help the paper cover stories it couldn’t cover otherwise. There are similar newspaper-blog partnerships happening all over the country, at least in cities with forward-thinking papers.

So, really, Tri-City Herald … stop sounding so scared. Even though you cut staff in 2008 and then cut more staff and lowered wages in 2009, there’s still hope. Embrace the future. Online news, hyperlocal blogs, and citizen journalism is here to stay. You can’t wish it away via defensive editorials like this.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

This is the Sound of a Scared Newspaper

The goal is that the topic page becomes the authoritative resource for information about the topic. And generally, by “authoritative,” we mean it’s the page that earns and holds most of your search rankings about that topic, and the page that you can always refer people to when they need information. They’re kinda like Category pages, but not quite. I’ll explain the problem I hope a topic page will solve for one of our blogs, and show how we’ve setup our first topic page below.

What Problem Does a Topic Page Solve?

Primarily, it solves the problem that — for some topics — your hyperlocal blog might have lots of great information spread across multiple articles. Secondarily, some of those articles may be old or outdated and it becomes a challenge to keep them updated for new searchers who land on them via Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

My Specific Problem

In West Richland, there’s an annual event called Hogs & Dogs that attracts more people to the city than we have residents. It’s that big. We’ve been covering it since our blog launched in 2008, and we now have more than a dozen posts about Hogs & Dogs — some from 2008, some from 2009, and some from this year.

People come to this event from all over the Pacific Northwest, and they find our blog after searching online for information. But sometimes they hit a 2008 post, sometimes a 2009 post, and rarely a current post because the new content doesn’t always rank as well as the older stuff. So, we’re forced to go back and try to update all the old posts with links to the new content, like this:

That doesn’t really scale. You can’t keep going back and updating all the old posts (the ones that get search traffic) with links to all the new posts. So, our hopeful solution is the topic page.

Creating a Topic Page

Here’s how we’re doing this:

1.) Not a post, but a page. Rather than create a new blog post, we’ve created a WordPress Page. You can see it here: Hogs & Dogs. It’s somewhat bare right now, but we’ll add more content about the event as we get it. The theme we’re using (Canvas by Woo Themes – aff) allows us to create pages without having them show up in the page navigation, which is nice.

2.) Permanent URL. Although the content will be updated each year, Hogs & Dogs information will always be available at the same URL: http://westrichlandrealestateblog.com/hogs-dogs/.

3.) SEO & human-optimized content. We’ve created this page primarily for human visitors, but with the understanding that most of them will find it via search engines. The keyword is in the URL. I’ve optimized the page title. And we mention “west richland” and “hogs and dogs” several times in the page content.

4.) Evergreen, easy-to-update content. The page title says “2010″ but I can update that easily when the 2011 event rolls around. The page also lists date and time info, plus this year’s big raffle prize. All of that is evergreen content that I can easily trade out next year.

5.) Link to it often. No doubt we’ll be writing new blog posts as the event gets closer, but each new post will also link to this topic page and position it as the ultimate resource about the event.

Final Thoughts

The Hogs & Dogs event doesn’t happen until June, and even though people are already searching for information now — search traffic won’t really spike until the week before the event. We basically have about two months to get this page ranking for the terms that people use on the main search engines. I’ll let you know how it goes after the event has come and gone. If it works, we’ll be doing more of these on all our hyperlocal blogs.

Your turn: Are you using topic pages on your blog/site? Are they working? If you’re not, is it something you’d consider creating? Comments are open, as always.

——–

UPDATE, APRIL 26: For an update on this, please see Update: Topic Page Experiment.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

New Hyperlocal Experiment: Topic Pages

Anita invited me to share some tips for small business with local blogs — tips that answered this question/topic:

How to use a blog to enhance loyalty with existing local customers

That was a tough assignment because I wanted to customize my advice depending on the type of small business, and maybe even its location. But I eventually shared this list of four specific strategies/tactics that I think could apply to a lot of small businesses with hyperlocal blogs in any location.

1. Blog = Community Kiosk

Think of your business blog as the community kiosk, the place where locals go to find out what’s really happening around town — not just what’s happening at your business/store/office. You will create loyalty by becoming a trusted resource for local information.

2. Open Your Blog to Others

Don’t think of it as your blog; think of it as the community’s blog. Yes, you’ll share company news and information on occasion, but to create real local loyalty, you need to do more. You need to open up your blog to others.

Let your blog be the voice of community groups that don’t get attention from traditional media. Invite and publish guest posts from non-profits, local organizations, event organizers, etc. They’ll tell others about what you’ve done and become evangelists for you and your blog.

3. Be Visible Offline

I’ve written before about how posts on local events are some of the most popular content my wife and I write on our local blogs. What I suggest is this: Write about local events before they happen, but also attend events and then blog about them afterwards with photos. Show people what they missed. Be their eyes and ears at local parades, community concerts, etc. If you can’t blog about a big local event, find someone to be a guest blogger for you. (See #2 above.)

4. Avoid Negativity/Controversy

All this talk about being a community resource is fine and good, but it’s still a business blog that you’re running. You don’t have to blog about everything going on in town and risk alienating potential customers. I’d avoid politics on a hyperlocal business blog. I’d avoid being too critical of local groups, organizations, other businesses, and really just about anyone. You don’t have to be the town’s cheerleader who presents everything as Super-Duper Awesome, but you should skip the controversial stuff if you’re trying to build loyal local customers.

Your turn: I don’t know how many local business bloggers read this, but if you’re one, I’d love to get your thoughts on these tips — as well as your own tips for successful hyperlocal business blogging.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

4 Tips for Small Businesses with Hyperlocal Blogs

But more importantly, this is the tool that Search Engine Land uses to manage its daily news coverage, and I’ve recently started using it to manage content on my blogs (Hyperlocal Blogger and Small Business Search Marketing, my wife’s main real estate blog, and our four hyperlocal community blogs.

How RustyBudget Works

I think the first thing I’ll do is show you the dashboard for my wife’s and my blogs. It might help if we start with what the final product looks like. (You can click to see a larger version on Flickr.)

As you can see, we have an INBOX which is currently empty, and we have several folders — Cari’s Blog, Hyperlocal Blogger, Kennewick Blog, etc. Each folder contains links that we’ve saved. When I find an interesting link, I send it to the INBOX and then move it to the appropriate folder for future action.

While we have separate folders for each blog, you might have separate folders for each author, or maybe even for each Category on your blog. It’s up to you; you can make whatever folders you want (and choose the colors yourself, too).

How We Got There

Let me show you step-by-step how those stories/links ended up in the folders. It’s pretty simple, actually.

1. Bookmarklet to Save Items

RustyBudget provides a number of bookmarklets that you can drag to your browser’s menu bar. We used the bookmarklet for our INBOX, so whenever we land on a story/link that needs to be saved, I just click the bookmark and send it to our INBOX. You can see I have a bookmarklet for Search Engine Land’s dashboard and one for our dashboard. I could, if I wanted, have a bookmark for each folder, but I’ve chosen to use a main INBOX and then file things later.

The tool also recognizes if a story has already been added. When that happens, you get a message like this:

So, it’s pretty smart that way. And convenient when more than one person is adding stories into the system.

2. Manage the INBOX

Saved items are listed together in our INBOX, like you see above. Each story is listed alphabetically. The “CLR” link in the upper right will delete all the items. The “ADD” link lets me add a URL directly, without using the bookmarklet. When I hover my mouse over any headline, several edit options appear, like this:

3. Editing an Item

In the image above, the “blue pen” icon on the left is the edit button. By clicking that, a new window pops up to let me manage that headline. As you can see below, this is where I send it to a different folder. I can also change the headline, link, assign a due date, and more.

Two images above, did you see the hand/finger icon? If all I’m doing is moving the story to a different folder, I can click there and drag it to whatever folder I want.

And that’s it. After I’ve moved the stories into their correct folders, I have a nice, organized look at what needs to be covered on each blog.

Other Features

There are a few other little details that I like about it — one is the ability to export all the links you’ve saved as CSV, XML, or HTML. So, for example, the next time you see a “Hyperlocal News Roundup” post on this blog, I’ll have saved those links in the Hyperlocal Blogger folder then exported them as HTML for inserting into WordPress.

I’ve skipped over the admin side of things, which is where you create new folders, name them, choose colors, and so forth. Take my word that the management side is easy, too.

What It Costs

RustyBudget is FREE for accounts with one or two authors. After that, it’s $4 per month per author. If you have four authors, your first two are free and then you pay $8/month, for example.

Since it’s free, why not give it a try? You can get started at budget.rustybrick.com. It’s a tool that I think will make your hyperlocal blogging efforts a little easier to manage.

If you try it out, let me know what you think! Or use the comments to ask any questions. If I can’t answer them, I’ll invite Barry to come help.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Manage Your Hyperlocal Blog with RustyBudget