blog vs article in website

Hi Nikki

I'm in the process of rethinking my website strategy.
I've begun writing an ezine everyweek, I'm about to release ezine nº7, so still begining to get familiar with it.

Now I'm questioning if the way I do it is the best.

I have structured it in different parts: personal note, article, Charo recommends, events and teleclasses, practical numerology, and about Charo.

I write one article and publish it in my blog, then I add a bit of the article in the newletter, with a link to my blog to continue reading.

I do this just to leverage my work, keep the blog growing and avoiding the task of writing two articles a week: one for the blog and the other for the newsletter.

But I'm not sure if this is a good practice. Because this way I never add new pages to my site, only the blog grows, and I'm really struggling with ranking, I was dropped from 5M to 28 Mll (so bad!)

Is it better just to leave all the article in the newletter? I don't know how this will impact my ranking (if in any way).

Thanks and happy new year :-)

Charo

Thanks for asking the question Charo, I'm interested in the answer!

Well done for getting out a weekly ezine :-)  My goodness....!

Love Claire

x

Hey Charo,

Sounds like you've been busy developing lots of new content :o)

… if you could make time to write really good unique content for the blog and the website – that would probably be the ideal situation. Some of the best blog authors that I've seen tend to blog extremely regularly, but they also tend to be fairly relaxed and informal about what they post. The best blogs I subscribe to look less like collections of articles and more like informal conversations with a bunch of engaged readers.

… if you did this, you'd probably find it less time consuming to post more regularly, and you could re-purpose the content you build up on your blog into well written articles that you could later post on your website – which you could then announce on your blog. Basically you're looking to get your readers to engage with you, to subscribe to your blog, and ultimately to link to you and cite you (so that you can build ranking). Don't forget to visit other people's blogs and comment on their posts – when you've built relationships with other bloggers, they'll link to you...

So, I think in your shoes I'd be tempted to focus on building the blog – if nothing else you can look at the popularity of all the different posts, and the number of comments that each post receives, and use it to decide which themes and topics are the best to focus on and develop.

… also because you're using a blogging service, it's automatically helping you to create posts that are well structured for the search engines. Also your blog has a built in RSS subscription mechanism, so that people can easily subscribe to your feed within their newsreaders. Don't forget to send people from your blog to your website to join your mailing list.

You mentioned that you're struggling with ranking... Do you have a sense of which keywords you're trying to rank for? Your blog seems to rank quite  well for the titles of some of your blog posts - although I can't tell much about the keywords becasue my Spanish is so poor :o)

Hope this helps a bit.

Niki

Hi Nikki

Thanks for your in dept answer.

To tell you the truth, I'm a bit in a mess right now.
This month I'm participating in one of Michael Neill's coaching programs and I took as my goal to improve what I do until I can confidently call it a business :-)

And the more clarity I have about what I want, the more doubts I have about how to make it work.

This is more or less what has happened:

Yes, I'm struggling with ranking. When I wrote to you I was 28 Mll in alexa, Now I've disappeared totally! (with my website) I'm glad to know my blog is well possitioned at least :-)

I know I've done a couple of things which may be the cause. It seems that I've made a mistake somewhere.
Since numerology (in spanish numerologia) had many searches (450000) I decided to focus my keywords efforts in it. I also tried to use "proposito de vida"  (life purpose) even though it only has 1000 searches by month.

I thought that I could drive traffic to my site with numerology and when they arrived they could see that there is much more there. Just kind of being a display window in a shop. (I even had a dream about that)

How many searches by month would you take as good enough? (so your efforts are worthy for that particular keyword and have business about the subject.)

I also rewrote my copy for the index page, focusing much more on the problem I solve, being more specific and promoting my freebie. I followed more or less the structure of inspired-entrepreneur.com

At the same time, I begun a free monthly teleclass about finding inner peace, which I also made part of my main site (even though it's not visible from the index page)
Which one of those things was the mistake? I don't know because I made both around the same time. I guess a bit of everything was wrong.

So now that I've disappeared from Alexa, I'm deciding if, since numerology is not going to be the main focus of my work but only a tool, if its worthy of using that as a keyword in my homepage. 

I'm planning on focusing more on life purpose and personal growth in my work (but both keywords have much less searches) using EFT and numerology only as tools.

You suggested me in one of the teleclinic sessions, to focus on one subject instead of having many things on the same website, because a website that is unfocused is not well positioned my search engines.

And I understand that.

But having a different domain for every tool you use is too messy, don't you think?  and too much work if you have to create a single ezine and freebie for each website. If I did that, I could easily find myself with a site for numerology, a site for EFT and another one for life purpose.
So I'm finding really hard the balance between keywords with what my work really is about.

So as I told you at the beginning, I'm a total mess right now.

Any comments you can make I'll really appreaciate them.

Charo

Hi Charo,

It does sound like you're struggling a bit :o( Let's see if we can work through these points....

Firstly, I wouldn't lose any sleep over your Alexa ranking. Alexa rank is a measure of traffic that is, at best, inaccurate. Instead, I'd install Google Analytics (free) and use that to track your exact(ish) traffic and visits from natural search (SEO). Your Alexa ranking doesn't necessarily have anything to do with your search ranking, so I wouldn't worry about Alexa for the time being.

In terms of the keywords you're targeting for Search Engine Optimisation, in most cases, the answer is not going to be to pick the biggest term (by search volume) in your niche and optimise for it.

There are three things you need to weigh into the mix.

• Available traffic.
• Competitiveness of the term.
• The time you think you'll need to invest to get onto page 1 of the results (if you don't think you can ultimately get onto page one, it's probably not worth your time, because only about 10% of users ever click to page two (and beyond) of the search results).

In order to make a good selection you need to be able to look at the term you're optimising for, look at your website, look at the websites that are currently sitting in the first ten positions (on the first page) of Google for that search term, and then decide if you think you can create content (or optimise existing) content that will rank above them. This takes a bit of practical SEO know-how.

... have you thought about taking a basic SEO course, or hiring a friendly local SEO consultant to take a look at your site? For example, I can't see any pages on your site that are optimised for “proposito de vida”. Can you show me which page you've optimised for that term and maybe I can give you some tips?

… basically, in terms of SEO, your criteria for choosing which term to focus on is going to be your expectation of how much traffic you can get per unit of time you spend optimising. Which, in turn, depends on how well optimised your competitors pages are, the total traffic up for grabs, and how much effort you think will be required for you to leap ahead of the pack.

… for example, big terms like “numerologia” might get a lot of searches, but you might have to work very hard to get on the first page (at the moment you're on page 8, so there's going to be alot of work to do before you can start getting decent traffic from this term).

… but, terms like "proposito de vida" shouldn't be too difficult to rank for. So “numerologia” might be a good long term conquest, and "proposito de vida" might be more of a quicker win. Being in position 2 for "proposito de vida" might well give you more traffic than being on page 2 for “numerologia” - so there's much more to consider than just search volume.

So, “numerologia” could be a good term to target in the long run, but probably only if you're willing to really focus your site on this subject, and create content that's going to get you lots of quality links from other websites (which is perhaps the most important criteria that the search engines use to figure out where to place you)..

Does this make sense?

SEO is quite a large and complex subject – it might be good to either do a bit of study or get some help.

I understand the struggle you're having finding the overall concept for your site. Overall, my rule of thumb is – as much as possible – stick to one major concept per site. If you have a website that's about four or five different topics, only one of which is, for example, “numerologia” - then for a whole bunch of reasons - you're probably going to find it hard to compete with websites that are just about that topic and nothing else. Specialisation tends to win in this game, because people tend to link to sites / pages that they feel are authoritative on that subject, and - unless you're Yahoo.com - authoritative sites tend to specialise.

Also, if you have five different topics on your site, you'll need to make sure you tie them together with some kind of unifying theme, and make that the subject of your freebie. If you just have a bunch of different content around different themes, how will you know what kind of freebie to offer (most prominently) in order to maximise your sign-ups?

If I wanted to market a collection of skills that were quite different, and SEO was going to be my major strategy for getting traffic (and I was choosing keywords based on those skills – EFT, etc), I'd seriously consider having multiple sites and multiple freebies. But, remember there are sources of traffic other than SEO you could look at :o)

Hope this helps a bit,

Niki