How/Where to blog?

[Robtheblob]

Hi,

I've posted the same question in Ecommerce but then realised it's probably better placed here!:rolleyes:

I'm still pretty new here and am enjoying reading all the great advice everyone meters out! I have recently opened an ecommerce website - thelegstore. co.uk which sells hosiery. I know the website needs work - I am learning on that side too, but with respect to SEO, all I read on here is that I need to be blogging, blogging, blogging! I've not done this before and so am wondering where / how to get started. Which sites should I sign up with and what are the best ways to connect back to my website?

I am guessing for general SEO, I need to have a presence on popular sites but also to obtain traffic from the blog some relevant forums? Obviously, ladies fashion is the website's focus so does anyone involve themselves in any good forums / blogs that work in this area?

Any advise greatlfully received!

[Aussie Dean]

Yep I agree that your website needs some work before it makes people confident in buying from you.

I would focus more on getting your site up to scratch with SEO and "the look" rather than worrying about getting links from blogs first of all.

Take a step back and devise an SEO plan of attack.

Educate yourself on some of the basics like: meta keywords/descriptions, introducing relevant content, improving the look of your site.

There is no use getting a heaps of backlinks and plugging your site on other blogs and on forums if once visitors arrive they leave almost immediately as your site looks sub-standard.

Also if you arent that knowledgable on web design consider looking into some different e-commerce solutions that make your site look pretty professional for a small monthly fee as the one you are using at the moment looks quite basic and unattracive in my opinion. (look for a solution/company that offers ecommerce as their core business rather than domain registrar/hosting company that offers a shopping cart as an add-on)

[hsassociates]

Hello Rob,

I'm new to this forum and although I've been in and out a few times looking for tidbits of information, I came across your post and would like to offer some advice.

I've just had a look at your meta tags and realistically, they need some tweaking.

For instance, your main title tag should be the main keyword or keyword phrase that you want to try and get found by in the search engines.

Taking a quick look at Google's free keyword tool, I typed in 'hosiery' and it returned with around 63 keyword phrases, some with quite good traffic and not much competition.

Now, you really want to try and start using them for your website.

Your current title tag shows the following:

<title>The Leg Store - tights, stockings, holdups, footless</title>

Now, a title tag is basically a sentence that tells the search engines what your website is about. It should contain your MAIN keyword phrase (as close to the start of the sentence as possible) and perhaps another without making your title sound totally ridiculous, which could very well be 'hosiery uk', a term that receives 1300 searches a month locally and 2900 per month globally.

Add to this another keyword phrase like: 'women's hosiery'

Now, you may want to change your title tag to something like: Hosiery UK - An Online Women's Hosiery Store Offering Fashion Hosiery To Make You Look And Feel Great.

So, in this title you have 3 keyword phrases: hosiery uk, women's hosiery and fashion hosiery.

Your current description tag shows the following:

<meta name="description" content="The Leg Store : Fashion Hosiery - Tights, Footless, Holdups, Stockings, Pamela Mann, Cette, Louisa Maria Lugli, Gatta, Sexy, Stylish, Nylon, Fishnets, Fishnet, Patterned," />

Your description tag should not be the same as the title tag but should also contain your main keyword phrases. keeping it less than 150 characters will mean that it will show up in full and not be abbreviated or cut short.

So, a good description may be:

Women's fashion hosiery store offering a wide range of fashionable hosiery tights with easy online ordering and fast delivery.

This description is all you need. It starts off with a keyword phrase, it tells too that it sells fashionable hosiery tights along with easy online ordering and fast delivery!

Your current keywords tag shows the following:

<meta name="keywords" content="The Leg Store : Fashion Hosiery - Tights, Footless, Holdups, Stockings, Pamela Mann, Cette, Louisa Maria Lugli, Gatta, Sexy, Stylish, Nylon, Fishnets, Fishnet, Patterned," />

Amongst your keywords, if I tried to determine what your website was about with just your keywords I'd be a bit confused. Ok, there's 2 keywords that tell me it's 'fashion hosiery' and 'tights', but the rest have no meaning to me whatsoever.

I understand that these people's names are probably designers but ideally, you want to have single webpages designed specifically for each of them. For example a page about: 'Pamela Mann hosiery' or 'Pamela Mann tights' etc, etc.

Do you sell 'Nylon'? Nylon what?
Do you sell 'footless'? Footless what?
Do you sell 'fishnet'? The type for fishing or the type that ladies wear?

I think you mean: 'nylon tights', 'footless tights', and 'fishnet tights' - Type these terms into the Google keyword tool and you'll see which ones have less competition that you can use on your site.

You want to remove nylon, fishnet and footless, as well as the designer names and put 3,4,or 5 keyword phrases (that's plenty) related to your main phrase (UK Hosiery or similar) and put them on your index page.

Many search engines don't use a website's keywords in determining what that site is about. This is taken by the title, the description and the actual content on the page when it's spidered by the search engine robots.

Getting your website indexed and ranked isn't just about the correct meta tags as I've mentioned above, there's a few other things: You also need to sprinke each page with a few keyword phrases you're using or trying to rank for and placing these in H1 and H2 tags which tells Google that your page is 'important' and relevant to that specific term/phrase.

Using Google's free keyword tool will tell you instantly what keywords are popular, have high or low search volumes and also, have little competition. Use them in your own title, description and keywords tags and you'll start seeing some better results.

I hope this has helped a little and if I can be of further assistance, just ask. I'll try and help the best I can. I'm no expert, I just wanted to learn this stuff myself because I've been so frustrated in the past.

Good luck with your Leg Store!

[Greatime123]

I am learning on that side too, but with respect to SEO, all I read on here is that I need to be blogging, blogging, blogging! I've not done this before and so am wondering where / how to get started. Which sites should I sign up with and what are the best ways to connect back to my website?

You can use third parties to do your blogging:

Blogger
Wordpress
Typepad
You've got to update it weekly, monthly to keep people up to date and interested.

Or you can set up your own. You can log into the cPanel of your website and llok for aadons etc to create your own webblog.

[Write My Site]

Hi Rob,

The first piece of advice I would give you about blogging is to bolt the blog onto your website - this will be much more beneficial to your SEO efforts than blogging off-site and then linking the articles back to your site. You can always add some guest blogging into the mix at a later point for the backlinks but at this stage, your priority should be to demonstrate to the search engines that your site is being regularly updated with fresh, relevant content.

[dan_1985]

As has been said when you do set up your blog make sure you have it on your own domain.

We use the 'Thesis' theme from Wordpress, hosted on our own domain (you can see our blog here - www.stockdisplays.co.uk/blog (http://www.stockdisplays.co.uk/blog)). I would highly recommend going down that route when you set up your blog - Wordpress is so easy to use and has thousands of great widgets and tools, and the Thesis theme is really easy to use and customise.

[shadowlu]

First i want to know the aim about your bloging. You want to attract the customer or search engine?

If the answer is people, you should only blog in one place and update weekiy, add amount of info that people may interest. if not, you should regist in many blogs (use google you may find much blogs), do the back-links.

[jappie10]

To find some relevant sites in your field, maybe you can try this:

search in google:

<your keyword> and add: intitle:blog
example: hosiery uk intitle:blog

This means you get search result from sites related to hosiery and have the word "blog" in their page title. You can replace the word blog for "forum", "weblog" and "news"

Besides intitle, try inurl as well.

Just a small tip, but maybe you can find some useful resources in your field that will inspire you to grow your own site.