The SEO Girl

I’ve been such a delinquent blogger lately! First it was end of the month busy-ness at work, and now I’ve come down with quite the nasty cold. A few weeks ago I co-presented a session on blogging best practices, emphasizing the need to blog regularly, at least once per week. It’s so true – it establishes your credibility and keeps readers coming back and your name in their minds. I quickly realized I’m simply terrible lately with blogging regularly, I’m either tired from my always interesting but stressful SEO job, or spending time chatting with friends about SEO and social media, or just living. I’m hoping to blog at least once a week now, and stick with it! I love writing about SEO and social media, so I just need to start dedicating more of my time to it.

Will be writing more soon!

- Your favorite SEO girl

So say you check out a blog or website and are asked to describe that website in 20 random words. Most likely, your word choices will be a little all over the place, but they’ll probably tie together enough to form a picture on what the blog is mostly about. This is the same concept as a “tag cloud” – a tag cloud is simply a collection of main themes on a blog or website – often seem a bit disjointed, but actually do go together to form an idea of what you mainly talk about on your blog.

There’s tons of tag cloud generators out there, and I recently used Wordle to generate a tag cloud for The SEO Girl blog, only the very best blog out there, of course (just nod along). The larger the font in a tag cloud, the more often you talk about that topic or theme. For The SEO Girl, I’m big on “SEO” of course, another was “industry” which makes sense, “blog”, “search”, and “PageRank”. Nearly all the words in my tag cloud related to the search industry, so it looks like despite my rambling posts, I’m on track! I encourage you to do the same with your blog or website – it’ll allow you to get a quick snapshot on the theme of your blog posts to be sure the big topics on your blog are actually what you want them to be, and if the keyword phrases you’d like to rank for on your website show up in a larger font in your tag cloud, chances are you’re on target with your SEO keyword targeting. Happy tag clouding!

Check out The SEO Girl blog’s tag cloud, courtesy of Wordle. Note how “love” is inside the “S” in SEO – how true for me!

I love blog comments – they show the author of the blog that people are actually reading and want to take the few minutes to actually respond to what the author had the same. We all have such busy lives, so taking those few minutes really means a lot. But alas, there are always those persistent blog comment spammers. Why oh why must you spam my comments?

I received my very first blog comment a few days ago, and was so excited when I saw it so delightfully appear in my blog’s dashboard…only to realize it was complete spam and submitted just for a link back to their site. I of course promptly hit the “Unapprove” button.

It mystifies me on on why blog comment spammers exist. Most blogs “nofollow” links inside comments anymore, so they’re typically not receiving any rankings benefit from it. There’s the traffic aspect of it, but if your actual comment says (paraphrased) “gobbleygook”, then chances are no one is going to actually click through to your site.

I do leave comments, with a link to The SEO Girl blog, on various SEO and social media blogs from time to time. But here’s the difference – these are blog posts I’m actually reading, find interesting, and leave a thoughtful, yes thoughtful, comment on! I’m not entirely a purist – I do have “more blog readers!” on my mind when leaving the comment, but I hope that my comment piques their interest enough to make them want to come and visit my blog and see what other rambling tidbits I have to say.

I love comments, I love real people, and I love conversations, so if you’re real and like to actually converse as well, leave me a comment from time to time