Content on Wordpress blog inside the main website for SEO

[shanky1]

Hi,

We have our main website and our blog on blog.practo.com. Now what I see is that we wish to write in content to grow our seo keywords and links.

Should we put the blog as www.practo.com/blog and then begin writing all the content or we should put the wordpress blog as www.practo.com/(wordpress blog here) and then begin writing the content.

For best practices I suppose we should have content lined up as www.sitename.com/category/article name etc  or www.sitename.com/article name etc - am I correct?

Our main site consists of few html pages and then we have our software on a different sub domain.

What are the best ways to publish content and get it crawled at a faster rate for growth?

I would also wish to understand how to measure the number of growth in % to our content we are writing. Only via google analytics or some other tool?

Say I wish to see the growth of 10 articles from month of may and compare it to the month of april or march 2012. So what tools could I use to see if we are progressing or not?

Thanks

[DesignbysoapLtd]

Hi there,

We always recommend our clients place their blog on a sub-folder, rather than sub-domain - so practo.com/blog rather than blog.practo.com. This way any links gained to your blog posts pass more power to your domain.

In terms of the URL it's up to you whether or not to include the category, but we generally don't on ours and client blogs. Practo.com/blog/article-name would be a good way to go (assuming you're talking about blog posts). If you're using Wordpress, change your permalink structure to %postname% and that will do it for you. To do that write a new post and hit 'edit' next to the URL under the title in Wordpress, then select 'custom permalinks' and enter it in there. I'd also recommend installing the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, which will really help you nail down the SEO elements of your blog posts and attack long-tail keyphrases.

For tracking and comparing month on month / year on year Google Analytics is excellent (and free).

For getting your content indexed, make sure you have a sitemap (a segmented XML sitemap will work well) and submit to GWT. Try and build some links to your content - or better yet, produce good content and promote it via social media and the links will come naturally, which will help with indexation. You could also consider submitting your site to Google News if the content is good enough and your site meets their requirements.

Hope that helps! : )