Blogging to help SEO?
Triple One (103 points) | Fri, 2008-05-30 21:45So we FINALLY have a website up and running, after years of telling my 77 year old boss that he needs to "upgrade". He has owned our small commercial print shop for over 30 years, never really advertises, only has an ad in the phone book, most of our business is word of mouth and the same clients since we've been opened.
Now, with business being slower (i'm sure for everyone) than it has been in the past couple years, we are trying to find ways to drive our site up the google list, but bossman isnt ready to pay $1200/ 3 months for our webmaster to do it for us. Ive done a bit of research as well as come up with ideas on my own, but could use a little direction.
I've created a blog, to get more links to our site, but cant think of where to start blogging that anyone would have interest in, and relates to our business. Sure, there is a lot of pertinent information out there that i could put on our page, but is that allowed? are you allowed to link to other sites articles in your blog?
Also, another idea i talked my boss into, was to have a monthly "drawing" for a free product, if you go to our site and fill out the contact form, for example, enter to win 20 free scratch pads with your logo! or maybe 1000 business cards, change it up every month.
Would any of this help our SEO?
here's our site!
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Offer free templates and advice. That will bring you incoming links. But you should do a blog on your site, not on a separate site.
Thats an easy one, I have dozens I use every day, plus my customers could even download them and use them and save me the time of setting up their jobs for print, thanks Ivan.
I didnt think about doing it on the site, would I have to get access from my webmaster?
http://www.ccprintinglv.com
If you have a good collection we can post about them here on creativebits for example. And it will be picked up hopefully by other design blogs and sites too.
See, Ivan knows how important content is. :)
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Powerpoint is not a design application
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Dirt and Rust
SEO has a lot of voodoo behind it, but basically it has to do with consistency of your information with what the search engines think you have on your site. Then it's a matter of being popular to get popular. The age old game that started in high school and continues today... :)
A blog that's updated regularly will do wonders for your SEO. Comments too. Linking to other sites is great especially if it's reciprocal. A few things you can do to make it easier to get ranked and thereby raise your SEO score:
1. Clear title tags with your site name and the page title
2. a sitemap.xml file that you then register with the big three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSFT.
3. Get a Google AdWords account and start building ads. You can start at just a few dozen dollars a month and go up from there. If you don't want pay ads you can at least track your traffic; though a server based WebTrends reporter does wonders too
Basically updated content wins the day. Just look at creativebits!
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Powerpoint is not a design application
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Dirt and Rust
Do you have a page on your site of samples of past work? I can't find it...
Oh, and for great SEO info, go here: www.seomoz.org
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Powerpoint is not a design application
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Dirt and Rust
But that was left out after we hit our budget. Our webmaster has all the info for it, because I think it is important, even though pics of print work arent done much justice on the web, people still want to see what we do.
The column on the left on the home page will eventually be all active links.
So if I have a wordpress blog, can I have my webmaster link to that from our site?
Ivan mentioned that the blog shouldnt be on a separate site.
http://www.ccprintinglv.com
If you can host your wordpress on your server (I think you can since you are running Apache) that would be the best option. Hosting it somewhere else will definitely decrease the benefit because you'll be directing traffic and searches (ie. dollars!) away from your company website.
Even if you can have a link to a pdf (you can do this pretty easily) with samples it will be better than nothing.
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Powerpoint is not a design application
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Dirt and Rust