Monday, April 6, 2009

Starting a Blog

By Jackie Lee

Your site may be a blog, but you will find you need to start more than one blog so you can have a place to build some links, provide some content and help your main site get going. Starting a blog to back up your primary site can be different than setting up a "real blog". Let's look at what it takes when starting a blog that is primarily for support.

Starting a blog to support your main site usually requires a free blogging platform, like blogger.com or wordpress.com. Although you have probably heard of these two there are actually hundreds of free blogging platforms online. It's a good idea to spread your free support blogs over a wide range of free platforms, it leaves less of a footprint as well as making sure you don't lose your whole network if a problem arises.

Spreading your network over more than a couple sites is a really smart idea. If you have all of your support sites on wordpress.com, let's just say, and they wipe out your account then all of your hard work has gone down the drain. This does happen. Speaking of wordpress.com make sure you read the fine print in their terms of service. They do not allow people to start a blog for the express purpose of linking back to other sites, or helping another site in the search engine listing. Even if you have great content on those blogs it doesn't matter. The other thing they may not only wipe out 1 blog they deem inappropriate, but your entire account. This is why it's good to set up accounts across many free blogging platforms, so if one gets wiped out you still have plenty of network left.

When starting a blog you are going to use to support another site you want to make it about a bit broader topic. Your niche site was probably very focused on a specific keyword or a tight niche, but you want your support blog to be a wider topic so you can include not only the keywords from this site, but others you may create in the future. It also allows you to link to other sites you find that you like, without compromising the integrity of the site.

Anchor text links are the most important thing when it comes to starting a blog to support your main site. You must make sure all of your links pointing back to your main site are using your keywords as the anchor text. Anchor text simply means the words that get underlined that people click on in a link. Many people will use "click here" as the link text. This is wrong. This will do your site absolutely no good. You must have your keywords in that position.

Starting a blog to support your main site is quite easy and it provides you an easy way to get links back to your site. You have control over the anchor text in these links as well. Make sure you use your basic SEO techniques on these sites as well. Keywords in the titles, make sure to tag your pages if you can, and always use keywords in your anchor text. It can seem like a big task to get this kind of network set up, but realize you will be able to use it forever.

About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment