WordPress
As I mentioned before, WordPress is the biggest scoring free service that you can use. It is also the only one that doesn’t allow you to spam their system and use it just for promotional actions. All the other services mentioned earlier allow you to monetize your blog or web site. Some share a portion of their revenue as well. So, if you want to make some money on the side, these services will provide you with the possibility to do so.
WordPress doesn’t allow you to build blogs just for Search Engine Optimization and I quote:
We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for Search Engine Optimization or commercial purposes, machine-generated blogs, and will continue to nuke them. So if that’s what you’re interested in, WordPress is not for you. A self-hosted solution would be much more appropriate for you; suitable hosts can be found at http://www.wordpress.org/ hosting.
Also see the following text taken from
http://support.wordpress.com/advertising:
This might be just one of the reasons that Google loves WORDPRESS.COM blogs. So how is it possible to use WORDPRESS.COM to promote your website? Actually, you don’t. On this service you are not going the promote your site in a way that you can do on the other services. On WORDPRESS.COM you truly build a blog or site containing pages with true value to the visitors of that blog. You can create an About page where you put a link to your main website and in that way show the readers where to get more information. You can also put a link to your website in the link section (Blogroll) together with a few other relevant links that contain valid information.
Blogging on WordPress and your ranking
If you cannot promote your web site in a big way then what is the point of creating a blog on WORDPRESS.COM? A blog on WordPress can rank highly for the topic that you are blogging about and will give you some SEO love through those rankings.
What is more important is the fact that you can take a special topic from your main web site’s topic and create a blog around that.
If you write your blog posts well and start to rank on that topic you will be seen as an authority on that topic and people will want to know more about you. That is the main reason to invest time to blog on WORDPRESS.COM to be recognized as an authority in your field of expertise. As you took only one topic out of all the topics that your site is about, you can do it again for another topic as well.
You could also see these blogs as a collection of topic silos that create an array of highly related web sites that point to yours. This kind of link building takes time, and a lot of it! Is it worth it? Yes most certainly, and in more ways than one.
With blogging you can achieve the following:
- An authority status if you do it right
- More traffic to your web site
- Better rankings in the search engines
- More insight into what the visitors of your web site are looking for
- To interact with other people having interest in the same topic as you
- Fun in writing and that will reflect on your site as you want to create more content on that site as well
There is also a downside that you have to consider—it takes time away from building content on your main site and you have to cover more locations to maintain in the beginning. If you use that blog to write some timeless quality content on a niche part of your main site you will find out that you can stop maintaining those blogs after a short period of time. Remember, these are valid blogs to build incoming links to your main site!
Digging deeper into WORDPRESS.COM blogs
Creating a blog on WordPress is also very simple, go to WORDPRESS.COM and get a blog. Wait! Don’t go yet! You need a few guidelines to start.
- Your initial user account name is going to be the first part of your URL, so name it right and remember, you cannot use a “-” in your username. My first account was seo4joomla so what I got was seo4joomla.wordpress.com. When you are logged in to WORDPRESS.COM and you type in the URL with a new keyword that you want (if it is not taken); you will get the option to add that blog to your account so that you can manage all of your WordPress.COM blogs from one place.
- Think about the title of your blog, if you want to change it later you can do that in the settings panel.
- Once you have your new blog, start cleaning.
- Delete the sample post and the comment along with it.
- Delete all the links in the blogroll (unless you are going to write about WordPress).
- Change the base post category from Uncategorized to a relevant topic name.
- Change the name of the links category from Blogroll to your most relevant keyword.
- Delete the About page and create a new one with the keywords of your blog in the title. That way your URL (page slug in WordPress) is containing the same keywords.
- Choose a nice theme layout that fits your topic, and if possible use a customized header. Using a customized header will give your site a slightly different look from the other WORDPRESS.COM web sites.
- Change the tagline in the general settings and start writing the way you do on your web site!
Using free blogging services
As you saw, there are several blogging platforms and free web site building platforms that you can use to promote your web site. There are a lot more out there on the Internet, but you need to look for the ones that rank well in the search engines before you put your valued time into building a linking “empire”.
These services are free of charge and sometimes live on the revenue that comes from the blog content they host. If you don’t want to be on such a platform where there are advertisements around your writing, don’t use them. If you are afraid that you can lose your blog on such sites look for a way to make backups (for example, on WORDPRESS.COM you can use the Export function).
How to minimize your blog writing time
Keeping content fresh and up-to-date on all the blogs that you build is not that difficult. If you focus on blogging on your own web site, you should try to integrate the RSS Feed from your web site into those blog pages. RSS Feeds are the best possible automatic way of updating one-to-many, so use it to your advantage.
Using your best content for link building
Use the best articles from your web site to get into the picture of social bookmarking web sites. Find the most visited pages and the pages with the greatest number of comments, if you have a blog on your Joomla! site. Go to bookmarking sites and bookmark your pages using your own account.
There are a lot of bookmarking web sites that you can use, just make sure you send your bookmarks to at least the following:
- Delicous
- Digg
- Newsvine
- Bloglines
- StumbleUpon
These are some of the most influential ones that count towards your search engine ranking and are a great way to get traffic. Traffic from this kind of web site will come in bursts and mostly will not span a longer time period than a few days.
The real power lies in the long term effect.
Writing articles for links
If you like writing about your passion, you can consider writing articles and submitting them to article publishing services. People are always looking for information and, if you can provide that to them in a smart way, it will help you to gain recognition as a field expert.
You don’t have to write long articles, but they must be informative and should give the reader an answer to a question they might have. Write those articles and submit them to services such as:
Each of those services have their own “Terms of Service” that you should read before submitting your articles. They have their quality guidelines as well. The length of the article might need to be of a certain minimum or maximum number of characters.
You might not be permitted to link deeper into your web site than the top level. Get that information before you choose a service to work with. Depending on the number of webmasters that will use your articles to republish, you could get a lot more incoming links from just a few well-written articles.
What you should NOT do is take an old article from your site and send it as an article to be republished. That could backfire, as the services mentioned have a clause in their “Terms of Service” stating that the article is original and not published before.
You should really not republish an already submitted article on your own web site, it could give your site a duplicate content penalty as that article will be published all over the Internet (with your link in it). An alternative could be that you publish some of your articles combined and rewritten into an e-book in PDF format that you give away for free from your web site.
