It’ll be taught by Mary Ann Giordano, the Times’ Deputy Metro Editor who oversaw the paper’s recently shuttered hyperlocal blogs called “The Local,” and also appears to be involved in the Times’ most recent hyperlocal project, a collaboration with NYU students called The Local East Village.

From the course description:

For those who want to start a blog to serve the news and information needs of their community, this course has all the basics. Using the expertise of veteran New York Times journalists, the course will help you decide what sort of community blog you want to build, then show you how to build it. A substantial segment will teach the fundamentals of community journalism and local reporting, including how to find and present information; how to check facts and preserve fairness in coverage; what you need to know about the basics of media ethics. The course will also cover how to find and develop an audience; how to get your blog noticed, and how to get your community (including potential sponsors) involved.

There’ll be weekly live sessions online as well as self-paced material. It starts next Tuesday and runs for five weeks and costs $175. You can read more about the class (and register by October 4) at the link above.

It would be easy to take the low road here and question the Times’ motivation or ask what one of the world’s major newspapers knows about on-the-ground hyperlocal blogging. But I see a lot of value in what that course description says:

“…the fundamentals of community journalism and local reporting, including how to find and present information; how to check facts and preserve fairness in coverage; what you need to know about the basics of media ethics.”

It’s not that difficult to learn to use WordPress, to learn to shoot breaking news photos or videos on an iPhone, and so forth. But real journalism is a craft and, if that’s what the Times is going to teach hyperlocal bloggers, I say “well done.”

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

New York Times Offers Class in Hyperlocal Blogging

1.) Do you have a print version of your local news site/blog?

2.) Have you ever considered doing a print version?

3.) Do you think it’s a good or bad idea to also have a print version of your blog?

I’m curious mainly because of this recent article in The Guardian about HU17.net, a hyperlocal site covering Beverley, England. Paul Smith is producing a 28-page, full color print version that is published every Tuesday — about 100 copies, the article says — and is distributed to “bars, barbers, and social clubs.”

Could you see yourself doing something similar? Here’s a quick poll. Don’t know how many replies you guys will give me, but I’m curious to gauge how many are doing this.

Comments are open if you’d like to expand on your vote. If you’re not doing a print version, why not?

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

Do You Have a Print Strategy?

Blogging, on the other hand, will continue to be the work of the few: eMarketer says about 12% of U.S. Internet users will update a blog at least monthly this year, and only 13.3% by 2014. We’re the minority. Not too surprising, especially with many “regular folks” finding it much easier to maintain a Facebook or Twitter presence and using that for sharing content.

There’s another important distinction to be made, and I’m glad to see it was mentioned in the eMarketer article: Going forward, the distinction between a blog and a web site will be harder to make. It’s already difficult in many cases, and you could argue it’s a completely unneeded distinction. Says eMarketer:

But there is a caveat to this forecast: Over time, blogs will continue to become indistinguishable from other media channels.

I already foresee the day when I need to change the name of this blog you’re reading now. It won’t be Hyperlocal Blogger. It’ll be … something that doesn’t force a distinction on blogging.

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

Reading Blogs: More Mainstream; Blogging: Not So Much

It’s by Jay Rosen of New York University and recaps a presentation he gave recently to new students on their first day at a French journalism school. There’s great stuff in here for those of you who are hyperlocal news bloggers:

7: Your authority starts with, “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” If “anyone” can produce media and share it with the world, what makes the pro journalist special, or worth listening to? Not the press card, not the by-line, not the fact of employment by a major media company. None of that. The most reliable source of authority for a professional journalist will continue to be what James W. Carey called “the idea of a report.” That’s when you can truthfully say to the users, “I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.” Or, “I was at the demonstration, you weren’t, let me tell you how the cops behaved.” Or, altering my formula slightly, “I interviewed the workers who were on that oil drilling platform when it exploded, you didn’t, let me tell you what they said.” Or, “I reviewed those documents, you didn’t, let me tell you what I found.” Your authority begins when you do the work. If an amateur or a blogger does the work, the same authority is earned. Seeing people as a public means granting that without rancor.

(emphasis added at the end is mine)

The article is geared toward journalists, so if you’re a hyperlocal business blogger, I’m not sure how much is in it for you. But if you’re an interested, engaged citizen (regardless of your blogger focus), I think you’ll gain from reading it. Here’s the link:

The Journalists Formerly Known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation

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

Jay Rosen’s Advice for Journalism Students (and bloggers)

• 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

When Matt suggested I write a guest post about “What Great Hyperlocal Bloggers Have in Common,” I was psyched: it’s always a pleasure to introduce a new audience to the amazing hyperlocal bloggers I get to interview each week for Outside.in’s ‘Bloggers We Love,’ series.

I was also stumped: I’ve interviewed bloggers from big cities and smaller towns and everywhere in between. They blog about everything from fashion to photography to politics, and each of them has a singular personality that shines through their online presence. To me, every single one of the ‘Bloggers We Love’ is unique: what could they have in common (beyond the obvious: they’re bloggers who’d love to have more hours in the day)? I began poring over my interview archives for commonalities, and I realized that it’s not all about what they do or where they come from, but rather it’s about who they are as people and how they choose to conduct themselves. They may be unique, but each of these dynamic characters share important character traits—and, while there are surely great hyperlocal bloggers who don’t exhibit one or more of these qualities, I’ve yet to meet one.

This one’s for all the hyperlocal bloggers out there who’ve demonstrated their greatness by showing us that…

10. They’re passionate. Tremendously passionate — they care deeply about their town, their subject matter and their readership. They value their community and respect it. They channel their passion into their blog, their personal relationships and all of their other, varied interests. Take Tasha Ball, for example, who’s fervent — evangelical, even — in her love for her hometown of Tulsa, OK. You can’t fake that kind of passion.

9. They’re dedicated. The hyperlocal bloggers I’ve come to know and love log some serious hours in the name of blogging — like Steve Sherron of the Monroe Scoop, who’ll spend hours editing video footage to get it just right. They’re hustlers: whether they’re blogging, organizing, hosting and attending events, Tweeting, posting updates to Facebook, adding photos to Flickr, you name it — they blog HARD.

8. They’re generous. They make a practice out of living generously, both online and off. They share the wealth when it comes to utilizing the social capital or publicity that their blog generates (like Jill Harrison of For the Love of Brooklyn who invites readers to contribute their photography to her site). They also share of themselves and their time, and they support and promote other bloggers by commenting on their blog posts, inviting them to guest post on their own blogs and tweeting about them.

7. They’re innovative. They’re always willing to try new things and step outside of their comfort zones. They like to pioneer new ways of doing things. Take Tessa Horehled of Atlanta’s Drive a Faster Car: for her, hyperlocal blogging meant skipping college and putting her career on the fast track. Creating your own possibilities in life? That’s innovative.

6. They’re omnipresent. They know how important it is to step away from the computer and get out from behind the keyboard. They don’t hide behind the anonymity that the Internet offers — rather, they use their blog and their online presence to build community and foster connections between people and things that matter to them. They understand the importance of networking and work to forge meaningful partnerships, both online and off. Like Christy Frink and Morgan Levy of Nashvillest, they’re accessible to their community, responding actively to their readers’ comments and interacting with them at local events.

5. They’re students. Top-notch hyperlocal bloggers —- like Liz Stambaugh of What’s to Eat, Baltimore? —- know that there’s always something else to learn, and they embrace this fact by constantly seeking out knowledge from their peers and mentors. They also don’t take themselves too seriously, and they ask for help when they need it.

4. They’re do-ers. They make things happen, get stuff done, execute -— like Jay Sears of My Rye, who rallied his community to secure a 4-way stop sign for his neighborhood. No matter what you call it, the fact is that great hyperlocal bloggers are the kinds of people you want on your team.

3. They’re fearless. They aren’t afraid to make a splash or write something that might raise a few eyebrows. Take Steve Shanafelt and the team at Spartanburg Spark: they ignited controversy by coming out against allowing concealed weapons on school property in their South Carolina city. Shanafelt and his team show us that hyperlocal bloggers worth their salt are willing to take a stand about the things that matter to them.

2. They’re valuable. Dana Freeman of Find and Go Seek in Burlington, Vermont, started her blog after realizing that there was a real dearth of family-friendly information available to parents in her area. The best hyperlocal bloggers listen to their community, pay attention to what it wants and needs, and provide content that fills the void.

1. They’re resilient. The most impressive hyperlocal bloggers I’ve gotten to know have responded to the challenges that they’ve encountered with ingenuity, bravery and aplomb. Take Corey Jackson of Downtown Lynn, for instance: when a local paper turned down his advertising dollars, he turned things around by getting others to write about the snub — and his traffic went through the roof.

Are there other qualities you think a great hyperlocal blogger should possess? Or, do you have suggestions for someone Outside.in should profile for our ‘Bloggers We Love’ series? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.

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

10 Qualities Great Hyperlocal Bloggers Have in Common

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