Came across this on YouTube today, an introduction to Wordpress blogging and comment moderating. Definitely worth a watch if you’re interested in starting a blog of your own - which I’d recommend, especially as part of a larger site. So long as a site’s blog is regularly updated it can really help the overall SEO, providing the search engines with fresh content to gobble up, and if the blog is on topic it’ll usually also provide opportunities for targetted cross linking. For example if your site deals with doll’s houses and you write a blog on the subject of miniature baths, you could link “miniature baths” through to a relevant page. I’ve even seen plugins that will automatically link mentions of specific keywords through to the relevant page on the site, making it even easier to take advantage of blog posting. Read more

There’s a lot of noise made nowadays about “link baiting”, but to those of us who focus on the whole SEO process rather than just linking practices, it can seem a bit of a mystery. My understanding is this: it is an extension of the old mantra “content is king”, but with a slightly more cynical, deliberate edge. Whilst I wouldn’t disagree that good, regularly refreshed content has to be the cornerstone of any site wishing users and search engine “bots” to visit and contine to do so, it’s always seemed a little niave to me to assume that “if you write it, they will come”. At least, I’ve never noticed that to be true - while you might have just written the best ever piece of literature on your site’s theme, it is unlikely that it will ever be noticed unless the site in question is already regularly visited by a high number of users looking for useful information. This simply isn’t true of most commercial sites (the type that SEOs most often find themselves working with) - their content is sales focussed through and through, and most users do not expect anything more. Read more