SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs: Introduction

by Matt on Jul 5, 2010 in Blogging, MY BEST POSTS | 9 Comments

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

seo-4Most 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

googleSearch 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:

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:

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.)

July 5, 2010 | Filed Under Blogging, MY BEST POSTS | 9 Comments 

Hyperlocal News Roundup

by Matt on Jul 4, 2010 in Industry | Leave a Comment

newsstandHappy Independence Day to all readers here in the U.S. Hope you’ve had as enjoyable a holiday weekend as I’m having. I just posted a couple fireworks photos on one of our hyperlocal blogs, and coupled it with some griping about people setting off pro-level fireworks in a residential neighborhood. Seriously, it’s sounded like a war zone tonight around these parts.

On a much brighter note, the SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs series will launch on Monday with the first of five articles. Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, here are a half-dozen links from the past week. I particularly enjoyed reading the Jeff Jarvis piece below on his Buzz Machine blog.

July 4, 2010 | Filed Under Industry | Leave a Comment 

Own Your Neighborhood, Keep the Big Boys Away

by Matt on Jul 1, 2010 in Blogging, Guest Posts | 1 Comment

(This is a guest post from Adam Shapiro, who first got the hyperlocal bug working for Neighborhood News 12 in 1999, and is now heading up hyperlocal efforts for Zebek. Adam is a “recovering” television newscast producer who also consults for Spyderlynk and Ripfone, and can be reached at adamjshapiro21@yahoo.com.)

small-flagIt all seems so obvious now…

… Friendster? “Like someone can do social networking better than us.”

… WebCrawler? “What’s a Google, anyway?”

… CompuServe. “We can auction off Sony Walkmans online. Who’s gonna top that?”

As crazy at it sounds, there was a time when those brands owned digital verticals that are now billion dollar categories. Then, as you’d expect, competitors followed and the territory that was once theirs… was gone.

The New Competition

Now there’s a new threat out there specifically targeting the neighborhoods our hyperlocal bloggers own: The Big Boys.

You know who I mean: AOL, Google, etc., there’s even a rumor Yahoo! is entering the fray. They’re all coming after your neighborhoods aggressively and from different angles. We’ve seen big corporations try to build “community” before and fail, and personally I think the odds are against them again here.

But you can never sit back and rely on that. Instead, now’s the time to retrench and take ownership of your neighborhoods as much as you can. In this sense, competition is good – it forces you to innovate and maybe even make money in the process. But the goal is to avoid saying one day: “Wow, we had it… and we lost it.”

Yes, it’s easier said than done. Few hyperlocal publishers have multi-million dollar marketing budgets and hundreds of employees at their fingertips (if you do, you’re probably on the wrong site). But I would argue that you have something more valuable – you know your communities better than they do and because of that you have more valuable content.

How Do You Leverage Being Small?

You find ways to take advantage of today’s innovation to further engage and entrench your communities. In the process you will no doubt find way to increase your revenue, a portion of which you can reinvest in your business.

However, theory is one thing… practicality another. So how do you specifically do it?

First off, every hour you spend creating content should be complemented by another hour working on your strategy and business plan. It sounds like a lot, and many of you have other jobs to think about too, but a focus on building the business (community and revenue) is more of a priority now than ever before.

Second, investigate the new digital technologies that come across your desk. It’s often as simple as plugging in a URL or picking up the phone. Every time Matt writes about a tool like Rusty Budget, Fwix or Woo Themes, see if the tools are right for you.

One thing to always keep in mind is that where there is an audience, there are many ways to drive revenue without sacrificing the quality of the experience you provide. The value is in the superior targeting you deliver every day. For example, often a business that’s in your coverage area will pay to sponsor your content, e.g. perhaps a local car insurer would own your Radio Reference feed. It’s targeting for them… and delivering content your advertisers want to put their name on.

What About Mobile?

Many believe that it’s the Holy Grail of hyperlocal, so consider investigating things like the SeattleCrime iPhone app. Could you do the same?

Perhaps the new video capabilities of the iPhone can help you create a video news element to your blog, as an easy way to improve CPM rates.

Here’s the good news: this research won’t take as long as you think. I know that because I’m living it. In interest of full disclosure, I work with a company that’s in the process of rolling out free iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps for more than 20 local blogs in early July (including notables like Baristanet, Maplewood Online, MyRye.com, Brooklynian, and BococaLand). We’re partnering to together figure out innovative and engaging tools for their content, while developing new revenue streams. We’re now in midst of finding our next wave of partners.

We’re excited to see how our collective efforts pan out – all of our partners agree that there’s a larger community to be had and, importantly, money to be made out there. Crazy at it sounds, our success might help them take that long-overdue vacation, but perhaps more importantly, allow them to reinvest in their brand.

The reality is… if not now, then when? The clock is ticking for all of us, before those Big Boys come knocking.

July 1, 2010 | Filed Under Blogging, Guest Posts | 1 Comment 

New York Times Drops Its Hyperlocal Experiment

by Matt on Jun 30, 2010 in Industry | 4 Comments

logoHere’s a change of pace: One of the big guys is getting out of the hyperlocal blogging business. The New York Times revealed today that it’s closing the doors of The Local, its pair of hyperlocal sites in New Jersey. The sites are being handed over to Baristanet, possibly the original hyperlocal blog.

The Times was one of the first major media outlets to try hyperlocal blogging/journalism, and when they first announced The Local, there was a fair amount of criticism. Some questioned the decision to try to cover three unique towns with a single blog; others questioned the decision not to launch each blog on its own domain (they were launched under the nytimes.com domain). And I pointed out the oddity of launching The Local on a URL that had the word “marketing” in it.

In its announcement, the Times talks about The Local being an “experiment” and mentions “lessons learned,” but I’m struck by this point they make about the capabilities of citizen journalists/bloggers:

From its launch on March 2, 2009, the heart of The Local has been our contributors, who taught us that communities are filled with talented, civic-minded, interested and interesting people who have much to offer in the way of local coverage. We are spreading that message far and wide, encouraging other journalists and news organizations — and other citizens — to venture down this path.

Quite a contrast to the recent editorial in my small-town newspaper, isn’t it?

I’d suggest you read more about this on Mediagazer, which has reactions from a handful of other sites, too. (thx to Nancy for the tip)

June 30, 2010 | Filed Under Industry | 4 Comments 

HelloMetro Continues to Grow its Hyperlocal Network

by Matt on Jun 28, 2010 in Industry | Leave a Comment

We tend to talk a lot about what AOL is doing with Patch, about big media’s interest in hyperlocal (e.g., CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, The Guardian, Seattle Times, etc., etc.), about small-town papers going hyperlocal … and yet we barely talk about what HelloMetro.com is doing.

What is HelloMetro?

hello-metroHelloMetro is building a network of hyperlocal web sites that currently covers 1,500 cities, 35,000 neighborhoods, and 50,000 zip codes. There are currently about 1,100 web sites in the network, covering big cities like HelloAtlanta.com and smaller towns like HelloRichland.com in my backyard.

In early 2009, the company started hiring local writers (HelloMetro uses the term “journalist”) to create new content across this network. The company says it currently has more than 2,500 local and exclusive articles, and its network gets more than six million visitors per month. (You can look at both sites above to compare a site with a local writer and one without.)

What are they doing now?

According to a news release last week, HelloMetro is going international — it’s hired writers in Canada, Scotland, Ireland, and Australia. The news release also says that the company now has 40 content writers with a “professional literary background” who write dozens of “new and exclusive” articles every week.

HelloMetro President/Founder Clark Scott emphasizes in the news release that the company isn’t a local content factory.

“We do not employ free blogs, create cheap content treadmill, or try to coax journalists into writing for pennies a paragraph,” Scott said. “Our goal is to ensure that every exclusive article published by HelloMetro provides enriching, valuable, professionally produced information about that city – from a uniquely local perspective.”

The news release says that HelloMetro pays its writers “a substantial per-story rate,” but doesn’t offer any more detail. A little research online, though, leads you to a copy of a HelloMetro job listing in Google’s cache. It says that HelloMetro pays $50 per article. No one’s going to retire on that wage, but it could make for nice spending money for a motivated local writer.

Final Thoughts

The main idea here is to point out that not all of the movement and energy in the hyperlocal news/blogging/content space is coming from the Big Players — something I feel guilty of focusing on. All of us down on the ground tend to perk up our ears when we hear about another big newspaper starting a hyperlocal project, or about CNN investing in the space. This industry that we love has a lot more branches on its tree than we may realize, which means a lot more competition out there for readers, advertisers, and attention.

June 28, 2010 | Filed Under Industry | Leave a Comment 

Hyperlocal News Roundup

by Matt on Jun 27, 2010 in Industry | Leave a Comment

newsstandThis week’s recap has some more stuff on some of the recent Knight News Challenge winners, a job listing from EveryBlock, and more. Enjoy the links!

June 27, 2010 | Filed Under Industry | Leave a Comment 

← Previous Page — Next Page →