Blogging & SEO

[MichelleG]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post so I hope you are all nice to me I excuse my lack of technical knowledge.

I'm looking at setting up a blog in possibly wordpress to help improve SEO on my website. If I have a tab on my website to link to the wordpress blog will this help my SEO or is it best to set up a blog on the same server as my website.

I have a Joomla website with Virtumart shopping cart.

Any advice would be much appreciated, cause my head is now starting to hurt with all the reading I am doing.

Michelle
http://www.luxurycurtainpoles.com

[seamus]

a blog (if used properly) can be a big SEO benefit, whether its on the same domain as your shop or if its on its own domain, doesnt really matter that much, I personally prefer to have the blog on the same domain as the shop, whats more important is how you use the blog.

if you write posts regularly and make the content totally relevant to your products and search terms, and link back directly to the product your blog post is about (or product category if its a general post about product types) that will give you a boost in the rankings, and give you another way to get people to your site (via the blog)

<edit to add>

if its a joomla site, you might not need to use a wordpress (I quite like wordpress though, its a cracking bit of software)
you could use this joomla blog extension (click here for a look)

[Lian B]

It looks quite good as it will automatically match in with your site template etc. It costs $59, wordpress on the other hand is free.

You could just install the wordpress in your own domain, but have it www.yoursite.com/blog

From looking at the back end of the joomla add on, its not 100% clear if you write the blog posts as articles or add them within the easy blog module it self. They have an article called test blog post, but it doesnt look like its in the actual blog. I think you just write them within the module.

When you look at how to write the blog post within the module, its actually really easy to add meta tags, blog tags and also permalink. You can link it with twitter, social bookmarking sites, feedburner, ping sites and all sorts.   

This actually looks really good for the money. I might test it out when i get a chance. Let me know how you get on.

[Click SSL]

a blog (if used properly) can be a big SEO benefit, whether its on the same domain as your shop or if its on its own domain, doesnt really matter that much, I personally prefer to have the blog on the same domain as the shop, whats more important is how you use the blog.

if you write posts regularly and make the content totally relevant to your products and search terms, and link back directly to the product your blog post is about (or product category if its a general post about product types) that will give you a boost in the rankings, and give you another way to get people to your site (via the blog)

<edit to add>

if its a joomla site, you might not need to use a wordpress (I quite like wordpress though, its a cracking bit of software)
you could use this joomla blog extension (click here for a look)

Nicely elaboration seamus. Thanks for sharing this to us.

[Curious Cat]

Hi, I have Joomla and I have added a wordpress blog onto my site.  My OH got it on the domain for me so it shows as blog.domainname.co.uk  Seems to be working fine

cj

[EAOM]

Yes ideally you want your blog to just sit in sub folder of your main site e.g. domain.com/blog rather than a sub domain e.g. blog.domain.com this is because any benefit wont carry as much weigh in Google eyes other as sub domain don't transfer page rank to root domain fully. 

[conran]

I wasn't able to do it the way I wanted with my site, but I would suggest a subdomain if you can.

blog.yoursite.com

Google treats a sub as a different domain, but your visitors won't see it that way. Google won't penalize you if one is less effective than the other, you are free to link more aggressively without worrying it'll damage any traffic you currently have on the e-commerce side, and your visitors/customers will see it all as the same site.

As others have said, daily posting is key to building traffic on a blog. Wordpress is great for traffic and after a couple of months you can have a substantial site, and if it's feeding your e-commerce site that will increase traffic.

I would suggest not selling too hard though. Make it more of a community blog than a method of selling, include articles/product reviews/guides and link back and forth, and don't be afraid of linking to other sites in posts where appropriate.

[Rainee Bows]

There is no evidence to suggest that blogs are better on or off site , neither is there proof that a subdomain works better than a folder in the root of your site -  another common myth ,

aggressive link building is likely to get you into hot water with google , providing decent link bait to encourage people to link back to your site naturally because you have something worth reading is a much more sustainable approach and will please googles thirst for knowledge

The trick to selling online is to NOT sell ............ something people dont seem to understand .......


posting daily will only help you raise googles eyebrows if you post something worth reading , google is much more intelligent than people give him credit for


Rainee x

[wimathi]

You can start the blog in the same server. Blog will definitely help your SEO. Search engines like Google prefer unique contents. Blog is a great place for contents. That is the reason to get better ranking for blogs.
Today most blog softwares will  offer inbuilt tools to optimize for search engines. So there are few things you many need to do to optimize for search engines.
-Select a title related and contains your keywords
-Write keyword rich contents
-Place tags to your keywords
-Write an alt tag for keywords when inserting an image

[merlot105]

You can set up a blog in Wordpress and point it to a subdomain under your own website. For instance, you can create a blog like example.wordpress.com and point it to use this URL: blog.exampledomain.com, and technically it would reap the benefits of all the links you get to the blog. There is a small fee, but totally worth it from an SEO perspective.

[P2Webdesign]

Hi

My advice is always host your blog on your sites URL. Google is content hungry and the more content on your site the better and a Blog will only add to that.

Remember:

• Alway post links from your blog back to your site.. i.e. These are our great new products http://www.yoursite.co.uk/greatnewproducts.html
• Make the content interesting informative and relevant
• Add images and text if possible and dont forget the image tags

Nick
Ecommerce Website Design Somerset

[seamus]

anyone using zen cart and wordpress, Im developing a mod for zen cart that pulls content from your blog and displays it where ever you want, mainpage, an extra articles page etc, Im writing it from scratch so it will be compatable with zen cart version 1.5.0 and will run with any version of wordpress.

I'll post a link to a demo when its finished