Ask Kalena

You look familiar. Are you on Twitter? Subscribed to my feed yet?

Well, that wraps up Ask Kalena for 2009.

It’s been quite a watershed year for us and if you’re a regular subscriber, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to every single one of you for sharing the ride.

I’d also like to thank my loyal guest bloggers Andy, Saurav and Peter, as well as my hard-working Virtual Assistant Sarah for their dedication this year.

I hope you all have a safe and memorable Xmas, a kickass New Year’s Eve and remember to find some time to reward yourself for your hard work throughout the year.

As for me, it’s time to unplug from the Internet and shut the laptop down to spend some quality time IRL with family and friends.

Catch you in 2010!

Hi Kalena

I had a big discussion last night with my husband and my son-in-law who has done some work on my husband’s web site.

Jason (my son-in-law) has used WordPress for the site. There are currently about 79 pages on the site. In our conversation I was pretty adamant that I wanted to be able to SEO all the pages. I don’t want to rely on WordPress and it’s blog meta tags to get ranked.

Shouldn’t we be better served by a web building program than a blog program like Wordpress? I understand that WordPress has an all singing all dancing SEO plug in but is that really the best option?

I know that you use WordPress for your blog. And it seems the right thing to do. But do you also use it for your main site? Any advice you may give me would be most appreciated.

Thanks so much.

Vicki

Hi Vicki

Actually, sites built with WordPress are perfect for SEO purposes. We are actually thinking of switching our Search Engine College site over to WordPress because of the SEO benefits including deep indexing, cross linking, tagging, filenaming and various SEO plugins that pretty much make other CMS packages obsolete.

You and your son in law should have no trouble optimizing your husband’s WordPress site and hopefully achieving some good ranks and traffic as a result. There are a number of fantastic SEO plugins for WordPress and people are raving about how SEO friendly the WordPress Thesis theme is so you might want to check it out.

You might also want to my review my favorite WordPress plugins. Add to that list the SEO Smart Links plugin and you should be set.

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Like to learn more about SEO? Download my free SEO lesson. No catch!

We’ve all seen the wave effect social media can cause when it comes to spreading breaking news stories such as Michael Jackson’s death and the Samoan tsunami.

But social media is also empowering regular citizens with the ability to break news stories as they take place or spread the word about events they consider to be newsworthy. The phenomenon is birthing a new wave of Citizen Journalism and it’s one of the major reasons news agencies are performing backflips trying to stay relevant.

A perfect example of online citizen journalism occurred in the UK this week, when blogger Jonathan MacDonald witnessed a London rail guard verbally abuse and physically intimidate an elderly passenger whose arm had become stuck in a train door. Midway through the incident, Jonathan had the foresight to whip out his video camera and film the exchange, during which the Transport for London (TFL) employee hurled insults at the passenger, swore loudly at him and threatened to “sling him under a train”.

When Jonathan expressed his distaste to another train guard and suggested that the abusive staffer would lose his job over it, she laughed at him. As a result, he felt compelled to blog the experience and tell as many people as possible as he believed the passenger was being bullied and an injustice had been done.

As well as blogging and tweeting about it, Jonathan posted the video on YouTube, filed an official complaint with TFL about the incident and sent emails to several members of the London press. Social media did the rest.

Outraged viewers of the video joined forces to spread the word, with Twitter users pushing the hashtag #TFL into the trending topics list. Bloggers linked to Jonathan’s post, shared the link on Facebook, MySpace and other social media networks. Within 24 hours the story made headlines on Sky, BBC, LBC, ITN and on the front page of the Evening Standard and the Telegraph. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson became involved and at the time of this posting, Jonathan’s video has had nearly 145,000 views on YouTube.

As a result of Jonathan’s actions, the TFL employee has been suspended and is now the subject of an internal investigation.

The moral of this story? Never underestimate the power of social media.

From Jonathan’s blog:

“All I did was see something that shouldn’t be tolerated and used the ammunition we have in our hands – video/blogs/network… the main reason this story has flown is due to what happened on camera. We must remember that. It’s not me. I didn’t ‘invent the story’. I just blogged, like I do, and the Twitterverse powered the rest... The conversation may continue for a while and I hope that more citizens become aware of the power they already have to stop hatred, abuse and fear.”

Hats off to you Jonathan.

Just a quick post to say sorry for the lack of content on the blog over the past week or so, but I’ve been skipping school.

I’ve been indulging in a bit of rest and recreation with the family, touring around New Zealand after speaking at Search Engine Bootcamp in Auckland.

Apart from a few nights in Auckland, we went sight-seeing in rainy Wellington (where I introduced my son to the wonders of Te Papa), hiking the hills in Motueka, shell-collecting in Golden Bay, wine-tasting in Blenheim and soaking in Hanmer Springs where we had the bizarre and delightful experience of sitting in the hot thermal pools while it snowed on our heads!

See the picture of the pools included in this post.

Anyway, I’ve got lots of new blog material to share, a wrap of  Search Engine Bootcamp and a few Q and A’s coming up this week, so stay tuned.

Dear Kalena…

How can I make my blog searchable and rank well on search engines? How long on average does it take a new blog site to receive good traffic?

Thanks

Priscilla

Hi Priscilla

My first piece of advice would be to host your blog on your own domain name and not with any of the many free hosted platforms such as blogger.com, wordpress.com etc. This serves two purposes:

1. You gain maximum SEO potential from all inbound links you receive as they’re pointing to your site and not helping improve the authority of the main root domain that you’re blog is associated with.
2. If you decide to move things around, you have full control over how the pages redirect and can ensure no previously built inbound links go to waste if/when changes are made.

Once you have your own domain and hosting account to house it, the next big thing is having search engine friendly blog software. I personally use Wordpress as it’s one of the most popular and even without adding any plugins, it has some really good SEO features built-in. It’s also really easy to extend and add widgets / plugins to make it even better.

Put together a blog schedule to ensure you’re consistent with your posts – it could be daily, weekly, monthly or whatever works-out best for you. You could even set aside a day a week to prepare posts and write a few in one sitting then schedule them to go live at different intervals. Regardless of how often you blog, it’s essential to make blogging part of your routine as it’s very easy to let other things get in the way and before you know it, you haven’t posted anything for a couple of months.

While having great content is crucial, you will still find that it often isn’t enough to drive traffic, so the next step is to get your name out there. Comment on other relevant blogs, offer to guest post, participate in blog carnivals, promote your blog using other social media tools like Twitter and look for as many opportunities you can find to let people know you exist.

A new blog post can be indexed in minutes, but proper traffic and subscribers takes time to build.

If you’re serious about creating a successful blog, I’d also suggest checking-out ProBlogger as he provides a tonne of great advice.

Hope this helps!

Peter Newsome
SiteMost SEO Brisbane