Saturday, 21 February 2015

Blogging a Trail of Breadcrumbs

"Hansel and Gretel may have been the first Internet readers...They were both so ADD that they couldn't even remember how to get home on their jaunt in the woods.  Readers on your blog are the same...but they can't leave their own breadcrumbs to find their way back -- so you have to help them find out." (Daniel Vassiliou, Endurance SEO)



How do you make it easier for your blog readers to navigate your site?  How do you draw visitors to your site for longer periods of time?  How do you lower your bounce rate (visitors who make a brief visit and leave)?  How do your raise your Google rankings?

The Internet has "web spiders" or "web crawlers" which "trawl around the web following links and indexing all content of web pages" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler).  You want as much of your blog content as possible indexed by the web spiders.  Providing interlinks increases your chances of getting noticed. 

For small blogs, it is easy to set up manual links in your blog to other relevant posts within your blog. However, with larger blogs, it becomes more complicated.  Daniel Vassiliou recommends a tiered linking system using the top down approach starting with your homepage (http://www.problogger.net/archives/2013/05/15/interlinking-your-blogs-for-seo/).  

You can use plugins to incorporate breadcrumbs into your siet (see Yoast's breadcrumb plugins for Wordpress) which enables you to link pages and posts.  You can also use SEO Smart Links to match keywords to tags and titles in your blog (https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-automatic-links/).

When I studied French at McMaster, in grammar class we were given ten or fifteen French vocabulary words and we had to build an essay around those words.  The challenge was to incorporate all of the words into the body of the essay in a natural, rather than an artificial way.  

Similarly, as a blogger, you are given a list of keywords, applicable to your topic.  Your task is to mix in your keywords to fit naturally into your blog post.  For example, the other day, I did a blog post about Keywords.  Now would be a good time to share that post (see http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2015/02/keyword-search-is-key-to-blogging.html). 

Blogger Yaro Starak gives the example of a post written about "shared trading" in which he gives a definition of PE ratio (see "price to earnings ratio" at http://www.investopedia.com/university/peratio/peratio1.asp), a popular keyword or phrase.  In his subsequent posts, he attempts to refer back as often as possible, when appropriate, to the PE ratio in his anchored text (the underlined links). 

Incorporating keywords and interlinks into your blog posts will raise your page views.  However, don't overdo it.  Again, make it a natural fit.  As Daniel Vassiliou warns, nothing can replace good blog content, regardless of keywords and links.  Now would be a good time to share my post "Developping Good Blogging Content" at http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2015/02/developping-good-blog-content.html.  However, it can "boost strong content to the next level".  And it can help your readers navigate your blog, the way the breadcrumbs led Hansel and Gretel through the woods.  








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