SEO help 12 posts

I found that adding a blog to my website worked wonders. Search engines love sites that are updated frequently, and by going back to my older blog posts, and linking forward to the newer ones, as well as having references to my blog/website on other sites, such as Yahoo! answers (be careful of their spamming rules) that my website often comes up first. It also makes sense, if you live in an older, highly urban area, with a lot of suburbs, that you list the suburbs convenient to you on your website. Someone searching for lessons in one of those nearby suburbs will then be directed to your page, especially if you have no competition nearby. (All you have to do is say, "convenient to suburb A, suburb B, . . .")

Other things that drive traffic: I have an environmental policies page, a testimonials page, some FAQ pages, and I have terms on those pages that the search engines pick up. Search engines are also fond of highly interlinked sites, so having a lot of internal references, where appropriate, and a few outgoing links, especially to small blogs, will help you be noticed. You can comment on high-traffic blogs, which will give you a backlink to your site. Directories such as blogcatalog also help, as does linking your blog posts to social media sites such as twitter, facebook, myspace, etc.

I don't bother to track traffic anymore, once my website reached almost 10,000 hits per year. It didn't hurt that I was named one of the top 100 music education bloggers after six months of semiweekly posting, and that that list was republished on just about everyone's blog!

I use wikyblog--not well-known, and not as many bells and whistles as wordpress. However, I have corresponded extensively with the developer who responds to my requests fairly quickly and if I decide to self-host more options will be open (on his server he implements various security restrictions which limit what can be done on the site). However, wikyblog does easily support hosting both the blog and website on one site, and also supports multiple authors easily. Wikyblog is free and open source, so if you're a developer you can improve it (I'm not, I just suggest stuff for other people to add).

There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Having a separate website/blog allows you to crosslink between two sites. I prefer having it all in one place. However, for some reason people continually get stuck on the home page of my website and don't realize there's a blog there, but they're also not having to have two browser windows or tabs open to go back and forth.If I could figure out how to move people off my landing page I'd be more inclined to say an integrated site is better. (You can easily have an integrated blog/website in wordpress; your website pages are "pages", and your blog pages are "posts".)

I googled comedian classes la and your website as well as yelp reviews for your classes were at or near the top of the first page already!

I invite guest bloggers to participate; that usually invites a guest post on someone else's blog, and then I get at least one link back to my site; usually after a series of posts I'm put on someone's blogroll. You can also include your link in forum signatures, and don't forget sites like local.yahoo.com and local.google.com, where you can add your site to your listing. Another way to get inbound links is to answer questions on Yahoo! Answers; don't spam or you'll get your account cancelled, but you can safely include your website where appropriate to answer the question. Another way to get links is to have your blog listed in aggregators or blog directories; if your blog is impressive enough they will approach you and if you show signs of stability the listing is usually free.

HTH!
the classicalgeek
http://www.wikyblog.com/CynthiaWunsch (example of forum signature)