Before I get started on the meat of this article, let me just say the workouts are going extremely well right now. I am completely focused on improving my cycling speed and endurance and yes, my plan is working. Right now Monday and Wednesday I am riding 30 miles and going really hard. Sometimes I do intervals and others I will just go really hard from beginning to end. Tuesday and Thursday I am riding at a pace that keeps my heart rate between 145 and 150 bpm to help continue to build the engine. Saturdays I have been riding 50 miles with a group I ride with and they are extremely fast. Like “push your legs until you want to remove them because the pain is really that much” hard. Then I lift weights three nights a week and complete a tough core workout those same nights. My fitness levels are improving significantly and I think I will be at my goal weight of 175 lbs. by the end of March. BAM! April I am taking a trip that will get me out of the saddle for about 10 days, so I will be running on the road then.
Just FYI on my brother Jake’s deployment to Kandahar, he checked in via Facebook today and I have to say I am very happy. His message was simple, but money. Check it out. I am not sure it could have gotten any better.
SEO for Bloggers
We all want to drive traffic to our blogs, right? There are several ways to accomplish that goal — leaving comments on triathlon, cycling, and running blogs is time consuming but somewhat effective. Personally when I am reading the comments on a blog that I like and the person sounds somewhat intelligent and knowledgeable, I will often click on the link that follows their name and explore their blog a bit. If I really like it, I will put that blog into my list of “must-reads” and make sure I check back often. I have found some awesome like-minded people this way and have learned a ton from them.
Another way that you can drive traffic to your blog and open the world’s eyes to your amazing talents is through practicing smart SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”. Now you have to know that I am not the smartest person nor am I an expert at SEO. Shoot, I don’t even play an SEO expert on TV. What I have learned about SEO over the years is self-taught and is probably a little behind the times. Those of you who are experts should feel free to comment and tell me where the holes are in my approach.
In this article, I want to talk about the links that you place and how they can help drive traffic to your site. I use the concept of “Cornerstone Pages” to help focus my traffic to the landing pages that I want. It is an effective way to build up the links to specific pages that contain quality content and to improve your ranking at the same time.
If you look at the top of my site, you will notice there are several pages that contain content that most readers want to see. The list starts with “About Me” and ends with “Contact Me”. I use WordPress as my platform. Within WordPress I created a page for three separate categories, “Motivation”, “Product Reviews”, “Training Tips”, and “Race Reports”. When I am assigning a category to my articles, the ones I categorize in these areas automatically appear on these pages. That really isn’t anything new and something you can do from Blogger as well. I call these my “Cornerstone Pages”.
When I am writing an article, I try to place one link to each of these four pages inside of the text and then I link to the appropriate Cornerstone Page. I don’t use the same words that I used as the title of the page, but word strings that I know are more popular searches on Google and Bing. For example, I may include “running training tips” in the text of my article and then link that string to the “Training Tips” cornerstone page. Using generic search strings is good to cast a wide net, but I have gotten the best results from specific search strings. How do I know? I use Google Analytics to tell me what searches people are using to find my website.
I don’t feel Cornerstone Pages should replace any other strategies you have, but they can help round out your overall approach to SEO. You really should educate yourself to the benefits of SEO and how with a couple of simple steps, you can start increasing the traffic to your site. Here is a great Beginners Guide to SEO. Is SEO important to you or do you just let your writing do the talking? And in the meantime, here is a great image I saw the other day that I thought I should share.
Related Topics:
Triathlon Training Tips
Triathlon Product Reviews
Triathlon Race Reports
I have been participating in running and triathlons for 10 years and love the feeling that training provides. You may not agree with me, but you know you just can't look away...
Excellent to hear your bro is kicking ass!!
I don’t really do anything to improve SEO. Probably should but really just do not care – ha! I figure content is king so just try and write interesting stuff. When this actually happens I will let you know (-:
I agree with you 100% Jeff. I have been writing this blog pretty regularly for about four years now and I would think content would bring people here. But, there are those bloggers who have content that is not as fantastic as mine (read: everyone) but are smarter at SEO so they have higher rankings than I do. While that isn’t that big of a deal, I would like to even the playing field just a little.
That and I started a blog that focuses on no nonsense mortgages because my business partner is starting a mortgage company. I have been educated in a real way about SEO because that category is uber competitive. And I like competition, especially when I can win.
Have you ever seen any of those healthy living bloggers posts? Man, they are shit. Jason sent me a link from one about Crossfit as a joke and I clicked around on her blog for a little bit. She posts like 17 times a day? It was unreal. She was posting about walking outside to get the mail with her dog and took pictures of the mailbox and dog? It was awful but there was like a 100 comments. Just do not understand?
Awesome Jeff. I gotta admit crappy content is no excuse for a blog. I suggest to those people they use Facebook or Twitter instead.
I could care less about stats and stuff. I write to write and that is all
I love your blog for the content
Aww — thanks Jen. I used to really worry about my daily page views and the such, but once I quit they naturally went up anyways. And since you know Chrissie Wellington, you can have a pass to any opinion you want. You are just that awesome.
You are on the right path Mike. First it all starts with content and once you have content it falls back to generating back links and there is no easier way to do that then to link to your own content just the way you are doing it.
The other great way for health bloggers to generate SEO is to have a Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest and any other social media account associated with their blog and using the same name.
Have a Mike R facebook fan page and a 262ismycooldown blog does no good as there needs to be a correlation between the two.
Jason I would love to learn more.
This field is constantly changing and oh so amazing.
Mike -
Anytime you want to chat SEO and Internet Marketing let me know. This is what I do for a living and have a passion for so I’m always up for a conversation.
Ask away and I will answer to the best of my abilities.
Of course I do. Let’s start here — outside of title of the post, quality content, and outside links, what is the most important piece of SEO advice you would give to fitness bloggers?
Make sure that the First three words of the title are the first three words of the content and the first three words of the meta description.
Also, make sure that it matched the URL.
Look at your URL for this post: 26.2ismycooldown.com/afghanistan-deployment
You should generate searches because of afghanistan deployment but the title does not mention that nor does the start of the content.
Excellent. I will focus on this from now on man. Thanks Jason!
Good to see your fitness is on the up, sounds like that schedule will do it.
The last 3 search terms that brought people to my corner of the interwebs were:
are unicorns real
the decline of apple
inside a pub
Clearly not getting much traffic as a result of my endurance sports posts.
Are unicorns real? Will Cadel Evans repeat at the TdF this year? I think both are unlikely.