SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs: Introduction
by Matt on Jul 5, 2010 in Blogging, MY BEST POSTS
(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.)
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:
- what the page is about, and
- 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.)
You might also like:
Comments
10 Responses to “SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs: Introduction”
Leave a Reply (please use your real name; company names & other keyword-based names will be deleted)
-
-
Featured Video
[...] SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs: Introduction, Hyperlocal Blogger [...]
Very nice post for about SEO beginners. I will recommend this post to my juniors.
Regards
Fahad Yousuf Khan
Senior SEO Executive
Thanks Matt for this intro and the series-to-come!
I now know where I be each coming Monday am to read more….and about time someone addressed this directly, eh!
Jim
Thanks – this is great idea to do a series about SEO and local blogging.
Another blog that I often reference for SEO info is Lunametrics – http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/
Thx for the quick and kind feedback folks. Much appreciated.
Lindsay – I just met Jim Gianoglio from Lunametrics last week at GetListed Local U in Cleveland. Cool guy.
[...] 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 [...]
[...] SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs: An Introduction [...]
[...] 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 [...]
Finally getting around to starting this series. So far you have freshened my memory about what Search Engines are looking for.
Thanks Matt.
[...] 1: SEO for Hyperlocal Blogs: Introduction — In this article, I covered the basics of SEO in the context of factors/signals that tell [...]