4 Ways to Increase Your Blog’s Effectiveness

September 2nd, 2010

Blogging is definitely becoming a company-wide effort, so make sure you take note of how to participate effectively in this activity–whether it be for personal or professional reasons!

Update Blogs Frequently

It might seem obvious to update a blog regularly, but many blogs suffer from a lack of fresh content.  There are many reasons to produce new content regularly for your blog, and, given the nature of blogs, they are much easier to update than a website. One of the biggest reasons to update is to keep your readers coming back. If a blog is never updated with new posts, readers will start to lose their incentive to check back for new content. Additionally, if the blog is hosted on your website, search engines will look favorably on all of the new content being added to your site on a consistent basis.

Provide Useful, Informative Content

It might be tempting to write a blog post hyping your newest product or promoting your company, but blog readers are looking for informative, sincere content.  Most readers can tell the difference between a blog with useful information versus a blog that sounds like a marketing campaign or advertisement. Take this opportunity to connect with customers and provide them with honest information about new products, industry trends, or even job openings.  However, stay away from blog posts that seem like they have a hidden motive; provide a real and honest voice on your blog that customers can relate to.  A great way to get sincere and also fresh content is to encourage employees to write blog posts.  This is often the best way to come up with new content and give more employees a personal voice in the company.

Utilize Keywords in Blog Posts

Many of our clients understand the value of keywords, as they are the basis of search engine optimization, but the importance of using keywords cannot be overstated. Keywords are search terms that customers use to find your site, your blog, or your product.  Not using keywords within your blog content underutilizes a valuable resource. It is possible to use keywords as many times as it makes sense to in a given article, but make sure to not throw keywords in excessively.  This is called keyword-stuffing; search engines consider this “spammy” and downgrade your rankings accordingly. A good baseline is to use all primary keywords two to three times each in a 250-300 word article, and any secondary keywords once in an article.

Choose Effective Titles and Calls to Action

In addition to keywords, there are many other opportunities in a blog post to be very specific in word choice.  A catchy, attention-getting title might be the determining factor in whether someone clicks a link to your blog post.  A great technique is to ask or answer a question in the title of your blog, prompting your readers to want to find out more about your subject.  Examples might include “10 Tips to Increase Search Engine Rankings” or “Why isn’t my website ranking where it should be?” Now that you’ve gotten people to your blog post with a catchy title, where would you like for them to go next?  Would you like them to click over to your website and do some research on your products?  How about signing up for a newsletter or becoming a member of your blog?  Whatever the goal of your blog, make that clear.  A great place for a call to action is the footer of your blog. Here, you can provide a value proposition or call to action with a link to the next step.

I hope this information helps you and/or your company in writing upcoming posts, as well as providing structure to your blog as a whole!

-Alex

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Cookies or Chocolate Chip Cookies? Which Keyword is Optimal for SEO?

May 28th, 2010

Yesterday’s webinar was all about the ABC’s of keywords optimization. Or as Travis puts it: “How much is that keyword worth to you?”

KEYWORDS are the FOCAL POINT of your SEO efforts. So naturally, identifying your highest impact keywords, and then strategically incorporating them into your site are crucial to your SEO success.

Keywords fall into two buckets: Head match and long-tail match. Head Match keywords are general searches, like “shoes” or “cookies”, whereas long-tail match keywords are more descriptive searches, like “women’s dress shoes” or “chocolate chip cookies”. Because long-tail keywords are more specific, they are better matched to the searchers needs, have less competition than generic head match keywords, and therefore can produce a high volume of impressions.

The first step in maximizing sales from SEO is setting the right keywords. This means focusing on a short and ideal list of key phrases your sales prospects and customers use to find you.

On May 5th or 6th 2010, depending on where you live, Google changed its search results page. One of the changes included the Google Wonder Wheel, a keyword expansion tool which shows related searches to your current search inquiry. The Wonder Wheel is an incredible tool and particularly helpful with finding other options for keywords.

Using the example that Travis used during the webinar, let’s say your company is in conveyor services.

In Google, search “conveyor systems” and on the left side of your screen click on “Wonder Wheel”.

5-26-10_wonder wheel_1

Here, you can see other keyword options, to help narrow your search. Since you are in the industrial sector, click on “Industrial Conveyor Systems”.

industrial-conveyor-systems

Boom! Now you have six other keyword options to help optimize your search. We’ll go with “belt conveyors”.

belt-conveyors

Other Key Tools and Highlights:

  • Google Insights – diagnose keyword search trends & its popularity in geographical regions
  • Google Analytics – helps you understand what your customers are typing in to find your website, and which keywords you need to push to optimize, or if you need to start a PPC campaign
  • Make sure that your company‘s terminology is in line with your customer’s terminology—the keywords they search for should be the ones you’re optimizing for!
  • Keyword selection is your foundation for optimization. Keyword selection takes 2-3 weeks, in order for the account management team, analysts, and engineering teams to understand your keyword selection base.

Choosing the right keywords are the KEY to success—wow, that was cheesy…but you get the point. See you at the next webinar!

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Anchors Don’t Weigh You Down

May 13th, 2010
Anchor

Anchor

We talk a lot about links around here, both internal links and inbound links.  In today’s Introduction to SEO webinar, SEO Linking Essentials:  How to Generate Inbound Links, Travis got into the nitty-gritty of the process.

Anchor text is a little like the outlet that links plug into.  If your outlet is poor, you’re not going to get good performance from your link because it won’t have reliable power.  Using your carefully-chosen keywords as anchor text for relevant inbound links gets the amps flowing.  As tempting as it is to write copy for your site that tells people to click here and here, it is much better to give them an idea of where they are going, say, Grand Canyon or Great Barrier Reef.  That way you don’t lose your visitors and you don’t confuse the crawlers.

Just for fun:  anchors.

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Attracting Spiders – Copywriting for SEO:

April 22nd, 2010
What a lot of spiders! They must like it here!

What a lot of spiders! They must like it here!

Why should I bother to read your site?  There are so many sites out there and I really don’t have time to look at yours.

Good question.  Both human and crawler visitors want to know.  Answering that question with your content is the big task of content writing.  Fortunately, our latest webinar in the Introduction to SEO series, Copywriting for SEO:  The Art and Science of Content Creation, provided insight to our audience today.

To begin, you need some attention.  Great titles for your articles attract readers, but they won’t stay long if that’s all you have on offer.  Spiders, much like people, get impatient and bored with the same old stuff.  Give them a compelling subject underneath that great title, and they’ll stick around.  It’s even better if you make it funny, educational, engaging, or all of the above.

However nice it is to have folks sticking around to read the content you’ve spent so much time and energy creating, it’s not enough.  You want them to DO something while they’re with you.  Ensuring that there is a call to action—a link to click to download a white paper, perhaps—up high on the page helps to turn casual visitors into actual leads.

Finally, write like a human, but keep an eye on the spiders.  Spiders understand a lot more about context than they used to.  They will be able to get the gist of what your content is about, much like your human readers.  Using your keywords in your content makes spiders notice them and subsequently improve your rankings for them.

The answer to why I should bother with your site?  Because it’s fascinating, timely, relevant, useful, and often really entertaining.  And I don’t mind all the spiders it attracts; I don’t have arachnophobia.

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Moving, Without the Tape and Boxes — Website Redesign & SEO Rankings

April 21st, 2010

When you redesign your website, it’s a lot like moving.  You won’t throw out your back lifting heavy boxes and you won’t have to figure out how to maneuver your suddenly much-longer-than-you-thought couch around the corner to get to the door, but there are a lot of similar logistical problems. In today’s webinar, Improving Your Search Rankings During a Website Redesign, Mike Turner gave a comprehensive overview of all of them, but one in particular stood out:  Don’t reinvent the wheel, just redirect it.

A real-life move takes you from one habitable spot to another.  Much as you wouldn’t move without your treasured inlaid mint-condition doodlesnipper because of its immense sentimental and actual value, you shouldn’t move your site without a plan to take your search engine rankings with you.

Before you ship that doodlesnipper, you want to take a picture of it, just in case.  Similarly, you should take a snapshot of your keyword rankings before the move as baselines for your traffic after the move.  Because the doodlesnipper is large with many attachments, you need to make sure all the boxes are clearly labeled and that you have mapped out where all the parts are going to go in the new living room.  Those attachments are like the different pages of your site; when you change their URLs, you have to map out which old ones should redirect to which new ones.

Then the key:  301 Redirects. Much as you forward your mail from one physical address to another, you forward your old page visits to your new pages. You want to use the 301 Redirect rather than the 302 because you want the change to be permanent, lest the crawlers consider your new page just a squatter and not worth bothering about.

Redirecting the tens or hundreds or thousands of pages on your site is definitely a big job.  The good news is that you don’t have to hire a truck.

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The Six Pillars of SEO — The Cliff’s Notes version

April 15th, 2010

I got six

Our Introduction to SEO webinar series continued today with The Six Pillars of SEO.  Here’s the two-minute, Cliff’s Notes version:

  1. Keywords:  These are the words you are optimizing around, the terms that you want to show up for when users search.
  2. Site Content:  Writing keyword-rich content helps search engine crawlers recognize your pages as relevant.
  3. Meta Content:  Customizing your page titles, meta content, and meta keywords, while old-school, are still best practice for optimization.
  4. URLs:  Using your keywords in your URLs will improve your rankings on results pages.
  5. Inbound Links:  When other sites link to your site as an authority, search engines are more likely to see you as one, too, moving you up the rankings.
  6. Content Silos:  Organizing your content into cohesive units helps search engine crawlers perceive your themes and find you more relevant.

And if you want to schedule a free site analysis for more details, click here.

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Optimize Your Site by Using Long Tail Keywords – Indiana Jones Did!

March 31st, 2010

Today’s webinar, Long Tail Versus Short Tail Keywords, made me think of Indiana Jones.  (No, not because of the spiders crawling all over the webpages!)  In the opening credits with the sepia map in the background, the little plane traces its red line from exotic location to remote landing to middle of nowhere to the exact right spot to find the lost ark.

If Indy had used Google, he might have started by typing in “ark.”  It’s a short-tail keyword, a mere three letters.  After paging through a zillion pages of Noah’s ark replicas, complete with zebras and chimpanzees, he’d get a little frustrated, but instead of lashing out at his trusty laptop with his whip, he’d get more specific.  He’d try typing “ark of the covenant.”  His little airplane is getting closer.  He still has to stop to rebut the scurrilous claims of Dr. Rene Belloq on Wikipedia, but that takes mere moments.  Then he tries the long tail search for “ark of the covenant Cairo” and Google gives him a handy amulet with an address.  His plane arrives and now all he has to do is beat the Nazis, survive the snakes, and rescue the girl.

Indy, like most searchers, is getting savvier in his techniques.  He’ll be quicker to find the temple of doom and the holy grail.  He’ll breeze right by the film versions of Doom and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  By the time he gets to looking for the crystal skull, it’s a wonder the search takes long enough to film.

Similarly, the purveyors of lost arks and the like can make themselves easier to find by optimizing for exactly the kind of long tail keywords Dr. Jones used in his research.  While there are relatively few archaeologists and evil empires searching for precious relics, those who search for “ark of the covenant Cairo” are ready to buy.

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Dear Santa…

March 10th, 2010

Dear Santa—

This is what I want for Christmas…

What comes next in your letter to Santa is what you want most, right?  You’re not going to put the shiny red bike or the Wii with the best games or the Radio Flyer low on the list if it is what you’ve been dreaming about for months.  To get exactly what you want, you have to make sure Santa knows.

Today’s webinar, Top 10 Tips in SEO for 2010, emphasized how important it is to choose the right keywords.  Think of them as the keys to those perfect packages under the tree.  With the right keywords, you get the red bike, not the dopey blue one and with the right keywords, you get the customers who really want your products or services.

To do this, you need to select specific keywords and put them in the right spots on your webpages.  Santa won’t know to bring you what you don’t ask for, and the search engine spiders won’t rank you for keywords you don’t use.

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