Hi again,

If this has been posted in the wrong section could someone move it or point me to somewhere that may be able to offer assistance?

:)

Hi, Juliat72, welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Blogs can have great SEO benefits, but there are a few pitfalls like the possibility of dupe content (from things like category pages) and bad title/META content (because of poor template design).

If you are using a blog like Wordpress, you will find internal features that let you customize your URLs. There are also SEO plugins that are designed to address other SEO issues.

As far as blog directories, I'd follow the same advice I'd use for any other website - stick to the major, human-screened directories and niche directories. Avoid directories that have no screening and a large number of cheesy sites listed. Be sure you are pinging sites like Technorati when you post so that new posts are indexed quickly.

As far as linkage with your main site, just do what makes sense. Clearly, it should be easy to get to the blog from the main site, and to get to the main site from the blog. What works for users will work for search engines, though I'd always choose link text that's beneficial to my search goals.

Thanks for replying rogerd, that's kind of what I assumed but it is nice to hear from those in the know!

The plugins, can they be downloaded from the WordPress site, or are there other resources you'd suggest looking at?

Also not sure what you mean by "pinging sites like Technorati"?

Thanks again for your assistance
J

Also not sure what you mean by "pinging sites like Technorati"?

Technorati is a search engine for blogs. You should set your blog up so that every time you make a new post it let's Technorati know and they come spider your content. It get's indexed much faster if you do this. Take a look at the site if your not familiar.

Thanks for that I have just been checking out the site and have found the submission page with the auto ping details, now I just have to find out where it goes in the blog configuration! You must think I am a dumb female LOL but working with a blog is somewhat new to me and stretching my basic coding capabilities!

Are there any others like this you'd recommend submitting to?

Thanks
J

I'd say your pretty smart considering you came to webmasterworld. Everyone has questions and everyone is here to learn from others.

Do a search for pingomatic and you should be able to find everything you need.

Thanks! I have done everything as suggested so cheers for your help :)

Good luck, Julia. Don't forget to employ offsite promotion techniques when you can, too. Examples would be making helpful and insightful comments on other blogs, forums, etc. Bloggers and forum operators tend to be skilled at spotting self-promos, so you need to be genuine and entirely non-promotional when you engage other sites.

Thanks rogerd I will bear that in mind :)

drupal OR jooomla OR wordpress .......in your experiance which has been more stable and beneficial in building a community website?

Ok, now you've got me started. I signed up for Technorati.

I think this is what I'm supposed to put in to get pinged but where do I put the code? I have blogger.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>weblogUpdates.ping</methodName>
<params>
<param>
<value>YOUR WEBLOG NAME HERE</value>
</param>
<param>
<value>http://www.YOURWEBLOGURL.com/</value>
</param>
</params>
</methodCall>

you can get two benefits by adding blog into your site. (1) content can be increased with the passage of time and those could help fix content to rank up. (2)blogs are primalarly SEs friendly, so that no need to optimize. Blog can be favorable, if it uses in a right manner, like urls must be SE friendly, content must be unique, no link farming, don't use your blog for link building, if you have better contents, people wants your link to be placed on their sites. So overall blogging is a way to enhance site content and let the crawlers to visit frequently.

thanks,

bilalseo

Any Blogger experts who can answer annej's question?

Pinging is pretty simple in WordPress - there's a text box to enter the URLs to be pinged.

Technocrati states that Blogger will automatically ping them if your blog is set to public. I have yet to see this happen, and it's on my list of little irritations to take care of in the short term... In the meantime, I have bookmarked the URL that is used to alert them of new posts and visit it after posting.

Right now I'm just going in and pinging every time I add an entry. Would be nice if it were automatic though. If you find anything out let me know sticky mail.

AnnieJ,

You might want to check out Up Smart Update Pinger plugin. That may well solve all of your problems. Just make sure if you're using the Feedburner plugin, you disable "PingShot" so you aren't pinging Technorati twice.

The other thing to be aware of, depending on your settings that Smart Update Pinger will only ping on a new post. If for any reason you go in and change a title or URL of a post, people searching for your post coming from Technorati could wind up on a page with a 404 error.

I hope that helps.

blogs can ping......any idea for static websites for quick indexing?

Farhan, for static site, you need to build unique content and targeted link for targeted contents. If the site has old content, then you can get benefit of content maturity, and if it has fresh content, then quality link building can boost up your site content to the top ranking. But be aware, do not post in forums, comments area of the blog, signature posting, etc. Build links by submitting your site on free article directories, create personal blogs on different blog networks, use social contacts to gain unique visitors. Hope this could help you in better way.... thanks,

bilalseo

thanx Bilal..... i was thinking of switiching over to wordpress for better seo results since i am adding fresh and unique content everyday.....should i go for a dynamic cms like wordpress blog or let it be static? which you feel would be of more benefit in SEs?

Wordpress can make adding new content easier and is able to create a hiearchy of pages by creating "pages" instead of "posts." Since pages are generated dynamically, making site-wide changes to appearance, sidebar or header content, etc. requires only one file edit.

The sole advantage of a true static site is that you can edit every aspect of every page if you want to. The appearance can be different, the meta content unique, etc.

SEO plugins for WordPress will give you more control of individual page content, e.g., custom title and meta tags.

thanx rogerd for the advice. Me using a paid cms which is static and more flexible. The only think i want from the crawlers is to index more often. Does adding content daily make them crawl daily? how do they know which website is updating daily? since this is static i cant ping them abt the new content updates.