Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Building Traffic and Social Media-Live From the International Food Bloggers Conference
I will be posting my notes from each of the session at the IFBC, but please keep in mind they are very rough and just the highlights. Hope you find them useful, especially if you are not able to attend. Be sure to check http://www.foodista.com/ifbc2010/ for IFBC presentations.
Joy Victory (@thejoyvictory) - editorial czar for Wordpress.com New job role, updates the wordpress.com site and manages new user experience.
How to Make Friends with Search Engines
Coming soon: FoodPress
Traffic:
- Front door - direct traffic
- Back door - traffic from search engines
Look at your stats often - take time to understand the terminology and graphs. Who is coming to your site and from what sources. A tool you can use is Google Analytics.
Recommended tool: Google Insights
Write with keywords in mind. Make sure you use this in your blog titles and be very specific. Use them in the first sentence of your post, in sub-titles, in photo captions, in any links you create to the post (when you tweet about your post as an example). Do some research for yourself - go to Google and do some searches. Take a look at what comes up in the search results.
Other things to keep in mind-
SEO also improves when you:
- update often - the more content the better
- have in/outgoing links
- along with new trends, blog about the tried and true trends like well know dates, events, topics
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Mani Dhillon, General Manager - Urbanspoon
As they put this site together:
- they found that people look for restaurants by neighborhoods and zip codes
- SEO link bait, novel ways to present their data that other wanted to link to. They picked a black background and created Restaurant At Night and found this attracted visits because of how it looked. They also used current trends and used them in their posts.
- spoonbacks - presents reviews from bloggers, critics and readers. Bloggers that participate in the spoonbacks program (over 2000 participate) get million of users viewing their posts and linking back to their blog.
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Questions
Q: What are your thoughts on integration with Twitter and Facebook and advice you have.
Joy - WordPress.com - when FB and Twitter came along we were asked, 'do you see them as competition?' No because they are very different especially as you can't see your Twitter content several years back like in a blog.
Mani - try to encourage people to register on Urbanspoon so that that can share the information on Facebook and Twitter. They're keeping their eye on new things like Facebook places.
Q: We've talked about SEO, for the people just getting started, what are 2 -3 things you recommend?
Foodista - used Twitter to grow their audience - tweeted trivia for example and then Twitter added them in their food follow list. Their advice - Be clear on what your goal is. Do you want to make a living on your writing? Do you want to make money on advertising? Is it a way to do PR and marketing for your company?
Joy - have a niche and be specific. Keep in mind that it takes time to build a following. Update often.
Mani - find an area that is unique. Get links for your blog.
Q: Recommendation for blog titles when a name or word uses special characters?
A: Don't use special characters as that is better for SEO
Q: I am very succesful on Twitter, is there something like Google Analytics for Twitter and are advertisers looking at that?
A: Not many good tools, but Google is indexing Twitter content.
Q: For a person just starting, how do you determine the value of your time when using things like foodbuzz, foodspotting?
A: It takes a lot of experimentation.
Q: Saveur - Is there a widget to put FB/Twitter comments into your blog?
A: Not any that we're aware of.
Q: What advice you have for SEO when you use video?
A: Use the keyword VIDEO in your titles, descriptions and tags.
