Month: January 2010

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Loving the WordPress Atahualpa Template

I have to say that the Atahualpa WordPress template is by far one of the nicest and most customizable blog templates that I have used. You can visit the designer’s website to see what other templates they have or to download your free copy.

What I like about the template is the ability to create your own banner for the blog and the ability to customize colors easily. Here are several blogs that we have helped to set up that are using the Atahualpa template:

Each blog has a unique template but you can see some of the similarities when you review each such as sidebar, categories, and tag placement. It can be a difficult job to customize a blog template but with the widget-driven Atahualpa WordPress template all the controls are set up in a very easy to use control panel.

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Featured Blog Client – Marco Island Luxury Estates

We’ve got a new customer that we wanted to highlight today – Marco Island Luxury Estates. This fairly new blog is owned by Keller Williams Realty the top Marco Island Realtor. The blog showcases Marco Island real estate listings, points to the Marco Island Florida MLS property search tool, and highlights interesting tidbits about Marco Island life for new visitors and home owners.

Many real estate firms have problems in setting up a blog as they use a template service for their main website. This keeps them from having a blog installed under their own domain name. In this case with the Marco Island Luxury Estate real estate team from Keller Williams, we purchased a keyword dense domain name – www.Marco-Island-Luxury-Estates.com and installed their blog there. The main website is located at www.MarcoIslandLuxuryEstates.com. Note the nice match of domain names but with keywords separated by hyphens to piggyback on Google’s new thrust of keyword rich domain names.

The blog points back to the main website providing keyword dense links and helps to drive traffic to the main website using keyword dense blog posts using a variety of selected keyword phrases. So check out the blog to see what you think. If you have a similar problem, consider an off site keyword dense domain name for your blog if you just can’t install a blog under your own domain name.

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Blog Content Matters – It’s All About Your Readers

Many blog owners forget that blogging is not all about search engines, it is about the readers! Oh, I am not saying that search engines aren’t important, but to have a blog really work for you on many different levels, your having great content and building readership should be your focus.

Search engines cannot be scammed. What garners subscribers and readers to a blog as well as encouraging people to come back is what search engine love too and will reward.

I’ve had a few incidents recently where prospects want super cheap writing for their blog. They don’t care about topic or content, “just slap something up there for the search engines”. What they forget is search engines are highly developed cyber intelligence tools; weighing content of a website, analyzing topics on a page, reviewing keywords, looking for duplicate content in their index, and then assigning a score which affects organic placement. Great on-topic content both on a website and on a blog is rewarded by both search engines and by readers. Content is truly King!

We do not do “production blogging”. We care about what we write and our business has grown tremendously based on the quality of content that our writers produce.

Which would you rather read? A post which has no bearing on the website content or information that enhances the website and services you provide. Which do you think will build authority for search engines?

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Do Spin Off Websites Help You Organically

I have tested this concept myself for a full year. My main website is here www.McCordWeb.com. I created a spin off site just on the topic of custom web design and our templated Quick Launch web design services here www.McCordWebDesign.com.

For a year I monitored placement and trying out several search engine optimization techniques.  What I have found is that my spin off site has never really quite gotten the placement that I thought it would even though it was very focused and on topic. I was careful to not have duplicate content for the site so as to rule out that issue as a factor for organic placement.

Here’s a real world search example:

on www.Google.com search for custom web design Maryland. My main website is #1 out of 304,000. My spin off site is #80 out of 100 results. Although this is an incredibly small sample, when client’s come to me to say let’s do a two page spin off site – like a doorway page, I simply will not do it. It is far better to develop and work on making your main website the best it can be than to fragment your message and try to scam the organic results. Clearly my own test proves that a spin off site, no matter how optimized will not beat your original main well-developed website.