Getting Started with SEO & Hyperlocal Blogs
by Matt on Jul 12, 2010 in Blogging, MY BEST POSTS
(This is the second of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites. Future editions will be published on the next three Mondays.)
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:
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:
- 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.
- 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.)
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11 Responses to “Getting Started with SEO & Hyperlocal Blogs”
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Nice post, Matt…and I picked up a great tip on the Permalinks item….which I’ve just changed my own blog to now comply with that advice!
Appreciated muchly, Matt!
Jim
Thank for the tip on the permalink issue in particular. This has been a really useful post and I’ve bookmarked it for ongoing refernece.
Nice one!
I use tags and categories, but it is a maintenance issue if you don’t watch it like a hawk. Here’s how I would use both …
Lets say you have a local blog that has concerts or shows at a local stadium or theatre. First I’d write a page or post about the theatre, and I’d put it in the “shows & concerts” category. I would also tag it with the name of the theatre say “Acme Theatre”.
Then everytime a new show or concert was announced I’d write about it and tag it with Acme Theatre.
Here’s where the magic happens, you could do this manually but I’m lazy and use plugin called crosslinker, everytime it comes across a word it links it. So I would set up “Acme Theatre” to link to the tag “acme theatre”. So in the post as long as I mention “acme theatre” it sets up a link to the tag page. If you do something like creating custom category or tag pages [http://www.sugarrae.com/thesis-tutorial-creating-custom-categories/] you have a great user experience and a crawling point for the bots.
[...] Getting Started with SEO & Hyperlocal Blogs, Hyperlocal Blogger [...]
Good post Matt. While categories and tags are quite similar, I think they can still complement each other. For me, categories are used for the main topics of a blog and should be kept to a minimum number, and tags are used to link similar posts together. I like graywolf’s clever suggestion, will check out that plugin.
I also use both tags and categories. I have a category for each overall sport I cover (Baseball, Basketball, Football, Tennis). I use the tags for more specific items in a story, like the names of the opposing teams, or names of athletes I mention in the stories.
[...] Getting Started with SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs [...]
I think it is funny how in the first part you mention how Feedburner and Google Reader are taken into account when ranking, but when it comes to Google Blogging Platform you recommended we stay away.
I agree by the way. Just ironic.
A lot of basic stuff covered here. Good info for those just starting out.
[...] 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 [...]
Great post Matt. Perfect for those starting out.
I’d like to add a small insight that can help with a local blog. It kinda goes against what you said about sitemaps.
I think they are really useful if want to get more local exposure via some more slightly more advance strategies.
You can do two things to really hammer your local hyperlocalblog – submit to be a Google news site. Easier then you think. And add Video to your blog and submit a Google video XML sitemap , both opportunities will drive a ton more traffic to your local blog.
This of course is a little more advance stuff, but worth pursuing if you want more traffic and exposure through the search engines.
Thx for all the comments, folks – love the discussion. Matthew – that’s a good point. I haven’t experimented much with submitting to Google News. You up for writing a guest post about it?
Get in touch with me if you’re interested. I think the readers would find it helpful to learn how (and why) to do that.