Blogging has been cited as one of the most effective forms of social media marketing for achieving top visibility in search and on the social web and corporate investment in social media is growing significantly. This is as true for agencies like TopRank Online Marketing as it is for any business with a good story to tell. We’ve promoted blogs as the centerpiece of a hub and spoke model that has been adopted by many other agencies and corporate marketers.

While there are numerous success stories and sources of best practices, most companies handle their business blog in a way that disappoints. Even those corporate blogs that do manage to implement a customer-centric editorial plan, neglect to leverage key discovery and engagement channels like content optimization for search engines and social media optimization.

On November 5th, I’ll be giving a presentation to help business bloggers solve that problem and more, with “Optimize & Socialize for Better Business Blogging“. This presentation  will identify key principles and specific tactics that I’ve learned over the past 8 years of blogging here and for other sites, plus working with numerous client blog consulting projects. The session will provide hard won insights into leveraging SEO and Social Media as key tools for blog content planning, creation and promotion from the editor of the only 3 time #1 ranked Content Marketing Blog (Junta 42), #2 Social Media Blog (Social Media Examiner), top marketing blog (Advertising Age).

Key takeaways for the session include:

1. Plan your way into an infinite number of compelling and relevant content ideas that boost search traffic & engage readers
2. Create campaigns that incorporate blog content with other marketing tactics for extended search & social visibility
3. Promote blog content that inspires social sharing, link building and search traffic

In each area I’ll break it down into:

Blog Content Ideas & Planning

• Key Problems:  Running out of ideas, Lack of effective ideas, Difficulty in sourcing contributors
• Solutions: Tapping into front line staff, community and the competition using a feedback loop that will boost effectiveness and motivate others to join in.

Blog Content Creation

• Key Problems:  Corporate narcism, inconsistent publishing and quality as well as content that does not result in the desired outcomes.
• Solutions: Audience empathy and guidelines for content strategy that result in content that inspires action and sharing.

Blog Content Promotion

• Key Problems: Great blog content with low subscriber counts and poor engagement.
• Solutions: A process to integrate blog content distribution and syndication as well as engagement that will leave readers waiting to see what will come next.

As I’m prone to do, I’ll pack as much actionable information as possible into the session and provide a copy of the PPT deck to attendees. I hope to see you there!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | BlogWorld LA: Optimize & Socialize For Better Business Blogging | http://www.toprankblog.com

Is blogging dead? A number of high profile bloggers and news media sites from Scoble to Wired to the New York Times have opined the demise of blogging as a consequence of growing social destinations like Twitter and Facebook.

The reality is that like many other forms of media, blogging is evolving and with the right strategy, highly effective. Short attention spans are served by short form content like Tweets and status updates. When it comes to influence on business, longer form content like that found on blogs serves an essential purpose. Rather than displace the most valuable attention spent on blogs, social sites like networks, microblogging, media sharing, news and bookmarks facilitate awareness and engagement with blog content.

Smart online marketers see this and are putting their budgets and priorities where it matters. According to eMarketer, 1 in 3 businesses publish blogs for marketing and HubSpot’s recent  2011 State of Inbound Marketing reports that more companies rated blogs as “critical or important” (62%) than any other social channel. These investments are paying off: AdWeek’s “Changing Scope of Advertising” infographic cites blogs as the leading source of customer acquisition over any other social channel.

Key Messages of Your Niche Provide Focus for Content Promoted from the Blog to Networks and Channels of Distribution.

Blogs are perfectly suited as social media information hubs for companies or individuals that want to dominate their niche online. Blogs can play an essential role in an integrated search, social media and content marketing strategy that directly influences consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing. But with literally millions of blogs published online and mainstream media getting involved, how does a blog stand out, let alone dominate their niche?

The first step is to understand what your niche is.  Formalize your unique selling proposition (USP):  How is your content unique and how does it serve the needs of the people you’re trying to reach better than any other blog?  What does your blog stand for?  What specific can you focus on that represents demand (search keywords) and topical discussion (social)?

The mechanics of a coordinated blogging effort that leverage search, social and content marketing involves:

• Goals & objectives
• Key message and differentiator – USP
• Persona development
• Search and social keyword research
• Editorial plan mapped to search and social content
• Optimization
• Link analysis
• Social channel development
• Intersection with online PR, media relations, advertising
• Content promotion
• Real-time, adaptive
• Monitoring, measurement & refinement

Whether you’re frustrated with the performance of current blogging efforts or you’re starting a new blog and want to maximize effectiveness, following a coordinated online marketing approach with a focus, can force multiply the effect of a company’s ability to “Be where customers are looking” (search), “Be where customers are talking” (social) “Be a source of influence, trust and engagement” (content). The result? You dominate your niche because all signals of credibility point to your social hub whether it’s via search, social, media – push or pull.

For the full presentation, you’ll have too attend BlogWorld New York this week. Hope to see you there.

Sometimes I like to open presentations common questions people have on the topic. What questions do you have about making more out of your business blogging effort? What challenges do you have in your efforts to dominate your niche?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO & Blogging – BlogWorld Expo New York | http://www.toprankblog.com

Most corporate blogs are not only boring, but they’re disappointingly difficult to locate on search engines. Key messages, voice and timing are considered, but keywords to drive search traffic are not.

Numerous PR practitioners have approached me after I’ve given a SEO for PR presentation and mention that they’ve never thought of, or just don’t know how, to include search keywords in the copy. Here are a few, simple tips I’ve followed for years here at Online Marketing Blog that companies can follow to increase search traffic and visibility to corporate blog content.

1. Research a Keyword Glossary – Whatever the target audience for your corporate blog is, journalists, customers, employees, partners, analysts, investors or others – they ALL use search. Use a keyword research tool to build out a keyword glossary of topics that are in demand. Share that glossary with content creators as a reference when planning, creating and publishing content online – including blog posts.

2. Create a Blog Content Plan - Starting a blog is easy. Sustaining a blog over years is not.  Get into the habit of creating a structured, yet flexible content plan for your company blog. Decide that some days will follow a format and others are wildcards. Then assign keyword/topics to the planned articles, tips, interviews, surveys, liveblogging, company news, curated industry news and other content types. Most importantly, tap into feedback mechanisms like comments, keyword search traffic, off-post citations, social sharing metrics and links to make sure you’re on-track.

3. Include Keywords in Posts – There have been numerous how-to’s on optimizing pages but to sum up optimized blog post writing, follow these guidelines:  Find a balance of optimizing for readers and search engines. Omit one and you lose the other. Do both well, and you will boost relevant search traffic and engagement.

Include keywords in the title tag of the post. The first words of the title matter most.  Write a title that is more focused on the reader (feel free to use puns, metaphors or be ironic) for the On-Page Title. For Example:

On-Page Title (Focus: Readers) – 10 Ways to Create a More Engaging Facebook Page

Title Tag (Focus: Search Engines, Social Sharing) - Facebook Marketing: 10 Tips on Better Fan Pages

This is how the blog post writer can express their creativity by using compelling headlines and still provide literal titles with prominent keywords for search engines which do not understand puns or metaphors.  If you’re using WordPress for your corporate blog, then the All in One SEO Plugin will provide the functionality mentioned above.

4. Use Descriptive References vs. Pronouns – Personal pronouns “I,” “you,” “she,” “he,” “it,” “we,” “you,” “they” and objective pronouns “me,” “you,” “her,” “him,” “it,” “us,” “you,” and “them” have their place in great copy, but search optimized content requires more descriptive references. For example, which of the phrases below do you think is more descriptive and useful for both readers and search engines?

“It is particularly effective when they use it with the products from company XYZ.”

“Social Media Monitoring software from company 123 is particularly effective for Social Media Strategists when used in combination with products from company XYZ.”

5. Use Keywords in Links – When following a content plan, it is inevitable that more than one post will touch on a particular keyword topic. It’s important to provide readers and search engines with descriptive links to older posts. Such links should use keywords as the anchor text (blue underlined text). I’ve already done this several times in the post above.

Using keywords in anchor text gives readers an indication of the topic they’ll see if they click on the link. The same keywords give search engines a very important signal too, which can help improve how the page appears in search results.

The anchor text can also be pointed at pages off your website to share keyword “link juice” elsewhere. For example:

“Vocus Social Media Monitoring software (a TopRank Client) helps companies find influencers, monitor conversations, mentions and trends.”

There are other places to use keywords in coprorate blog posts (or any blog post for that matter) like the URL, the tags associated with the post, the categories it is placed in and image alt text.  Those are standard SEO guidelines for a web page. They apply to blog posts too.

The key takeaway is to achieve mastery over keyword topics that are in demand as well as creative copywriting so that your corporate blog is both easily discovered via search engines and more useful for the people reading it.

If you’re responsible for writing a corporate blog, are you actively employing SEO and keyword best practices? Have you developed your ability to write for both readers and search engines?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Where to Use Keywords in Corporate Blog Posts | http://www.toprankblog.com

Moderated by Adam Audette, the speakers included Sally Falkow and Michael Gray.

Sally opened things up to talk about Feeds. All blog platforms come with Feeds but there are many other things you can do with feeds. There are many types of feeds including a feed specifically for video. Sally says it’s pretty straightforward to create a RSS feed.

The web isn’t about pages anymore, it’s about streams of content. In fact, the whole social web is running on streams of content. Most of which is through RSS. Surveys show the adoption of RSS is low, but the problem is that most people don’t know what RSS is. If you ask about RSS, you get a blank stare. But if you ask people, “Do you use a My Yahoo, Google page, etc?”, they know what you mean. Asking about RSS isn’t unlike asking people, “Did you use your SMTP today?”.

New SEO Practices for a Google Caffeine World. “Sustainable organic growth requires a commitment to unique and valuable content creation on a regular basis and the wherewithal to deliver effectively.”

Real time web surfaces a lot more content and engines are after that. You need a content strategy to meet the needs of your customers. Search engines want that content too. There are a lot of things that you can write about to create content and then deliver to clients. You just have to figure out what and how.

SEO Advice from Matt Cutts:

• Know the search terms your audience uses
• Write good meta tags
• Spotlight search terms on your page
• Create a blog and post often
• Syndicate your content
• New Caffeine algorithm requires lots of fresh content and “citations” in the social web
• Get relevant sites to link to you

Think outside the blog: Types of content on a web page that could have a RSS feed include: News, articles, recipes, product updates, press releases, etc.

Pay attention to keyword strategy with the feeds you publish. Segment feeds topically for focused content (and keywords).

RSS can drive new visitors to your site by syndicating to destinations elsewhere on the web, which then link or point back to your site from within the feeds. (At TopRank this is one leg of what we call building a channel of distribution)

One platform to centralize content for syndication is an online newsroom.

Feeds and SEO – ROI
Feeds attract links, attention of bloggers, provide content to the social web for citations, boost search engine rankings and traffic to the website.

Next up is Michael Gray aka “Graywolf“.

The first slide Mike shows is: “Partial Feeds Suck” showing a woman who just sucked on a lemon.

Most publishers put out partial feeds to bring users to a website and measure them in analytics, for advertising or to prevent content scraping. There are ways to combat all those problems, so publish full feeds.

Why I love Blog Scrapers
If you publish links in your posts, blog scrapers (most of which are stupid) will retain those links back to your content. Don’t worry about them throwing off your link profile unless you’re a weak site.

How to help search engines realize your version of the post is the canonical verison? Hard code a link to your post at the end of your feed. Add keywords at the end of your posts (in the feed) as well.

Schedule your posts

• Know what days of the week you get the most traffic
• Know what time of day or what time zones bring the most traffic
• Schedule posts so tha tyou always have new content when people come looking
• Schedule your important posts, or social posts, to coincide with traffic spikes’
• Use holidays & special events to your advantage – Do it enough before that it can take hold
• You can write posts days or weeks in advance

Tweet your stuff multiple times

• A few times in one day, not six or seven
• Tweeting when you post may not always bring you the most traffic. Tweet at the best time of day for Twitter
• Tweet archived or best of posts that are not timely

RSS is a Lie

• Unless you are publishign about marketing, social media or topics on Techmeme, RSS adoption is low
• Even some tech subjects like gaming have low adoption
• Use email, Twitter, Facebook or other methods to bring people to your site
• Use others in you field to guage you success

How to deal with Dates in the SERPs

• Google can extract dates from the body of posts, comments and URL
• Generally, Googel tries to take the first date form the page
• Old dates generally have a lower click through rate
• Remove dates from posts that are 6 months or older
• Currently you can “forge” dates and “fool” Google, however this may change in the future

Takeaways:

• Use scrapers to your advantage
• Schedule your posts to get the most traffic
• If it’s important, share multiple times on Twitter, Facebook, etc
• Repost “Best of” content
• Don’t worry about RSS in industries outside of tech sectors
• Be aware of dates on your pages and how they show in the SERPs

My Question (because I get different answers from different speakers): How to configure a blog to avoid duplicate content between the blog home page, category and tag pages?

Answer (Michael): Excerpt the actual blog posts so only a portion appears on the blog home page and category pages. Use No Index, Follow not Robots.txt to exclude either category or tag pages. Add sticky content to the top of the category pages.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | SEO for Blogs & Feeds – SES Chicago | http://www.toprankblog.com

At the upcoming BlogWorldExpo conference in Las Vegas, I’ll be giving my recipe for success using Social Media and SEO in two ways:

First, I’ll be doing a solo presentation on Social Media SEO, giving bloggers a tested methodology for making the most of their content and social networks.

This presentation will focus on the value of combining SEO best practices with social media marketing to amplify the reach and traffic for blogs. I’ll outline and share examples of how to  build a Cycle of Social Media Interaction.  Specifics will include:

• How bloggers can leverage keyword research to develop a blog editorial calendar
• Best practices on creating and promote optimized content
• How to increase exposure through social channels of distribution
• Tips on organic growth of  fans/friends/subscribers and inbound links
• How to increase search and social media traffic
• How to mine community conversation data to further refine content strategy that continues the cycle

To see the detailed presentation, you’ll need to get out to Las Vegas  October 14-16 for BlogWorld New Media Expo 2010. In the meantime, here is a short version of the presentation I’ll be giving using the aforementioned recipe metaphor.

Second, I’m literally going to talk about SEO for recipes to food bloggers, “The Art & Science of Recipe Writing” on a panel with Jennifer Perillo, John Shiple and Sean Percival as part of the TECHmunch track. I believe it will be livestreamed so be sure to check in with @toprank for the link.

BlogWorld New Media Expo is a unique event bringing together online marketing professionals from a variety of disciplines ranging from public relations to SEO to affiliate marketing to food and military bloggers.  Be sure to subscribe for liveblogging coverage and video interviews during the event.

Now back to our metaphor: What’s your recipe to blogging success?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Recipe for Blogging Success at BlogWorld New Media Expo | http://www.toprankblog.com

This is a new small business, so considerations for what to do about a web site included: cost, functionality, flexibility, ease of maintenance and marketability. The web site needed to serve as both an online representation of the business, but without transactional functionality, as well as a host for landing pages used with email and PPC campaigns.

My recommendation for a low cost, easy to use and search engine friendly content mangagement system? Blog software.

What often happens when friends ask for advice regarding web marketing is that I’ll make some recommendations in a casual setting or email links to a few resources like this one on blog marketing tips, then a few weeks or months later, the conversation will turn to, “So, how is your blog or web site doing?”, and I find out that the site/blog was either not started at all, it was created in a way that blows away any chance of SEO or marketability outside of advertising or it was built using resources with no cost of entry but without the capabilities to scale if successful.

Something along those lines happend with my friend’s blog.

What was the issue? The blog was started using Blogger.com, which by itself is not a problem, but the blog address selected was: nameofstore.blogspot.com. This is understandable because it’s the default URL selection when you create a blog with Blogger.com.

However, picking a third party domain for the blog address violates one of the most important rules in sustainable blogging: Always host the blog address with a domain name you control. That means yourdomainname.com/blog or blog.yourdomainname.com or yourdomainnameblog.com.

Otherwise, you give up control. How so? What if the blog host goes down? Free services rarely provide support. Also, what if the service does not support the functionality you need? You can’t change their entire platform to suit your individual needs.

There are other reasons for keeping the blog address as part of your own domain name including the ability to change blog software services without having to change your blog address.

Of course there’s also a benefit for search engine optimization if you host the blog as a sub directory of your main company domain name such as yourdomainname.com/blog. Blogs are very linkable entities and other blogs tend to be enthusiastic about linking, so any links to your blog can be percieved as a vote of credibility to your main web site since the blog and the web site share the same domain name.

Now back to our tale of the small business blog. My friend had only made one post on the blogspot.com URL so nothing would be lost by moving to a dedicated domain name. My own experience with Online Marketing Blog was different. After blogging for nearly 2 years at a blogspot.com address, I decided to move to a dedicated domain name and WordPress. It took some talented optimization and 6 months of aggressive promotion to recoup the linking footprint (100,000+ inbound links) that was lost. Of course, now our traffic is multiple times more than what it was.

What my friend decided to do was register a domain name and setup a hosting account. Since there was no main company web site to attach the blog to, this makes the most sense. Essentially, the blog became the company web site. With more and more businesses, this is becoming a very practical, cost effective and functionally efficient way to manage web site content: Using blog software as a content management system.

As my friend asked what to do next, writing everything down in a notebook, it became clear that there’s a litany of things you COULD do with setting up a blog. Even if we filtered it down to what one SHOULD do, the list was amazingly long. As someone new to the whole idea of blogging and this not being a formal consulting arrangement, I decided to create what I think, is a short list of what a small businesses CAN do when starting a blog.

1. Decide the purpose of the blog.

Do this before going out and registering a domain name or anything else. Is the blog going to serve as a journal for starting the business? Is it a search marketing tool? Is it to be used to demonstrate thought leadership and create credibility? Will it be a communication tool for customers? Will it also serve as the main company web site? Is the purpose some or all of the above?

I could elaborate on setting up each of these types of blogs if I ever decided to write that book, but for now, we’ll stick with a blog that serves as a company web site, hosts landing pages, serves as a small business resource and marketing tool.

2. Pick a URL.

If the purpose of the blog is to support company brand and audience, then the URL should be part of the company web site. Ideally, the blog hosting situation allows for a sub directory such as companysite.com/blog.  Otherwise, a sub-domain such as blog.companysite.com will work and you can can host the blog elsewhere, separate from the company web servers. IT will like that.

If the purpose of the blog is independent of the primary company brand, or messaging, then a dedicated domain name such as topicgoeshereblog.com might work better.

It’s tempting to use a keyword only domain name, but those keywords will not be a silver bullet for search engine rankings. A catchy, meaningul brand name for the blog will go much farther as content can always be optimized for search engine rankings.

3. Pick blog software.

In most cases, WordPress is the way to go. An inexpensive Linux platform hosting account that supports PHP and mySQL can be secured for $10-$20 per month. However, should the blog get really popular, expect to upgrade to support increased demand. It’s entirely worth it.

The blog software will need to be installed on the server that will host it and the database will also need to be set up. This is fairly straightforward, but in all honesty, it’s best to have someone that knows what they’re doing help. As an example, I do very little of the technical work on our blog and prefer to have a specialist (Thomas McMahon) take care of maintenance, adding plugins, design and functionality updates. We have outside programmers do any heavy lifting in the application development department.

WordPress software is open source, ie free, so if you are code/technically savvy and you have the time to figure it out, it’s certainly doable. There is no one “right way” to setup a blog. There are literally hundreds of shades of gray.

It can cost a hundreds to thousand of dollars for a blog consultant to install, setup and customize the design of your blog. You’re not paying for the software, you’re paying for expertise that will save you MONTHS of time and allow you to get to market more quickly and efficiently.

4. Customize the blog.

After installation of the core blog software, there are a number of customization tasks.

First, the blog design should be modified to match your branding. If you don’t hire a consultant to do this, there are many free templates that can then be customized, but many of them require a link to the author at the bottom. Personally, I’m not a fan of those, but they are a low/no cost place to start. Design customization involves modifying the CSS, JavaScript, graphics and possibly a few database elements.

The second set of customization tasks involves plug-ins to improve the adminstration, front end functionality and the SEO friendliness of the blog. Thanks to Twitter and Thomas for this recommended minimum list of plug-ins:

• Redirection
• HeadSpace2
• Google XML sitemaps
• Gravity forms
• All In One SEO
• PostPost
• ACE WP Plug
• ComLuv
• Disqus
• Members only
• Cookies for comments
• Section widget
• Page order
• Related posts
• FeedSmith FeedBurner Plugin
• Sociable
• Askimet or WP-SpamFree
• Post Teaser

5. Create a content plan.

In concert with the purpose of the blog, it’s important to generate a basic editorial guideline for creating content. The easiest way to manage this is by creating categories for the kinds of content you plan on posting.

Before you create those categories, it’s a good idea to do some keyword research as the categories will become excellent repositories of related content. Why not make it even easier for search engines to understand and rank them?

Common keyword research tools include: WordTracker and Google. Paid keyword tools include WordStream.com and KeywordDiscovery.com

Once you identify which keyword phrases best represent the content you’ll be publishing, use them to name your content categories. Each time you make a blog post, that entry will be associated with one or more categories, creating a very search engine friendly repository of content.

Create an editorial calendar or schedule of posts to keep you on topic for your audience and true to the purpose of the blog. Leverage interactions with blog readers as well as your analytics to know if your content and keyword picks are productive or not.

6. Pick your blogging team.

In the case of most small businesses, the blogging team is a team of one. That’s fine, just be sure to document what’s working and what’s not so when the time comes, you can get your blogging team mate up to speed quickly.

Since blogger’s block (like writer’s block) can really dampen a good thing for a small business blog, go ahead and keep a good number of posts in draft mode. Add to them as you get new ideas and inspiration. Or facts and examples. That way, you’ll have a steady stream of blog posts ready to publish in advance. In fact, you can schedule blog posts in advance using WordPress.

7. Make it easy to share.

Blogging in a vaccum is inevitable blogging death. It’s essential that you solicit comments in your posts, respond to comments quickly, create and enforce a commenting policy. Being responsive is an essential part of attracting subscribers.

Don’t covet the comments either. Visit other blogs in your industry and write useful comments. Those bloggers may notice you and it can become something more, like an invite for a guest post, collaboration or simply a new online friend.

Make it easy for readers of your blog to save and share your content with sharing buttons or widgets. It pays to create accounts on the more popular services and develop social networks there. Your contacts on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and similar services will watch for your next post and vote for the good stuff, which can drive your content to be exposed on more popular areas of those web sites. More exposure can mean more traffic. The social bookmarks tool is handy for adding such functionality to any web page and Thomas offered several new blog promotion tips last week.

8.Get your social on.

RSS feeds come with blogs and it’s worth taking the time to make sure the RSS feed is readily available and obvious for people to subscribe. Submit your blog and RSS feed to our HUGE list of blog and RSS directories.

Set up social profiles on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as appropriate and automate the sharing of links from your blog posts to those services. In other words, you could use a service like TwitterFeed to publish your latest blog post to Twitter and Facebook automatically.

Be sure to publish your blog URL everywhere you publish your web site address.

9. Make static.

If you’re using the blog as a CMS for a small business web site, then make your static web pages such as those for About our Company, Product/Service pages, Contact Forms, etc. The blog can be customized to have a home page like any other web site as well. That way, visitors arriving on your site can see what they expect from a company selling products/services. At the same time, blogging creates a rich and frequent source of useful content that’s syndicated via RSS, promoted automatically to relevant social channels and leaves the door open for interaction via comments.

10. Measure. Test – Test. Measure.

It’s important that you set goals for the blog, a plan to execute tactics and most of all, measure progress. Most web site measurement is focused on web analytics and metrics specific to different types of marketing such as with email, SEO or PPC. Standard web analytics software such as Google Analytics will address the vast majority of your needs.

I would also recommend social media monitoring and analytics. Monitoring can be as simple as the RSS feed from search.twitter.com combined with the RSS feed from the results of a search on Google’s blog search. You could also use services like socialmention.com or more robust social media monitoring tools such as Techrigy SM2, ScoutLabs or Radian6.

Social monitoring tools will help you understand what your customers are saying about you on the social web as well as uncover new interaction opportiunities with influentials. Real time search means real time marketing and social monitoring can facilitate that. One example would be if a competitor Tweets a deal on a product. Your Twitter search on that competitor or product would create an alert. You could then decide to offer a deal at a lower price or some other counter offer.

Another example is if a customer complains about your company. Before others jump on the bandwagon, your social monitoring tools would alert you and you can then qualify and address the situation quickly.

As web analytics and social media monitoring tools become increasingly intertwined, you’ll be able to identify many other key metrics for the effect of your social participation on bottom line business goals.

There you go. Ten tips for starting a small business blog.

This was a long post and yet, it’s nowhere near a comprehensive guide to create a small business blog. Even though there is plenty of free blog software and advice available online, many companies would benefit from having professional help with a business blog.

The funny thing is, my friend will look at this post and say, “This is the SHORT list?”. Blogging can be simple to start, but no one said it wasn’t hard work.

If you’ve created a blog for your small business, what has your experience been? Did you do it yourself? Do you get expert help? Have you set up a small business web site using blog software? we’d love to hear about your experiences, challenges and successes.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Ten Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog | http://www.toprankblog.com

The topic of business blogging and search engine optimization as distinct and synergistic tactics have been explored here many times. A large number of companies are familiar with the process of starting a blog, but few have experienced the challenges of maintaining and growing a blog for more than a year.

Understanding long term benefits is key to sustainable business blogging.

Part of the goal was to tap into a variety of experience levels with this survey and capture insight into the SEO impact blogging.

Participants were solicited here, on social networks and vial email that blog. Here’s a simple breakdown of the 326 survey respondents:

• 28% Internal Corporate: Advertising, Marketing or PR
• 42% Agency: Advertising, PR, Search Marketing, Social Media, Marketing
• 30% Independent Consultant or Small Biz CEO

One of the biggest questions we were looking to get insight on was the degree to which marketers are using blogs as a SEO asset.

95% of survey respondents indicated that they do incorporate blogs as part of their search engine optimization efforts

While the majority of respondents  indicated SEO as a benefit to blogging, several comments indicated that there are resource issues:  ”We did but resources became an issue. Will be bringing it back in 2010.” And that the applicable use of blogging for SEO outcomes depends on the market:  ”Sometimes… depends on client and market and product/service”.

Blogs at the most basic level are straightforward or “easy” to start. But the real question is whether they deliver on the SEO promise so many blog marketers make. Our survey results show that 87.4% of respondents “successfully increased measurable SEO objectives as a direct result of blogging“. Savvy SEO practioners made comments like, “Absolutely. In fact, we make sure to create a small, quality cluster of blogs on different platforms and Class C IP’s to support their communications initiatives.”

Of the 12.6% that didn’t find measurable SEO results from blogging, comments like “starting to but since we don’t post comments from readers on our blog I think we stall any momentum that we are generating from our posts” and “Site owners are not able to follow through on keeping up with their blog.” provided insight as to possible reasons why.

How important are blogs as part of a SEO strategy? The majority of respondents (90%) cited blogging as important, significantly important or a primary SEO tactic. The remaining 10% rated blogs as somewhat important or irrelevant.

Many company marketers, public relations and communications professionals are not aware of what the SEO benefits of blogging are. We asked, “What SEO functions do blog(s) serve for you?”. While the responses were fairly evenly distributed, the most popular SEO benefit was that blogs provide an easy way to create new, optimized content. Content is the cornerstone for any search engine optimization or social media marketing effort, so it makes sense that content creation was so popular.

Overall, links were the most often cited SEO benefit from blogging: Attracting inbound links from other web sites or cross-linking from blog posts to corporate site content. Community building for content/links promotion and Increase crawl rate/frequency were also indicated as important SEO benefits from blogging. Additional social and SEO benefits from blogging mentioned include:

• Social Media word of mouth
• Show a human side to a business and another side to the more “static” web site
• Communicate back with customers
• Can surprisingly create evergreen #1 search rankings for odd phrases we might not have necessarily thought about in planning.
• We’ll serve ads through a network that allows blogs to publish our ads
• Traffic from twitter and the increased exposure that goes with that
• Establish authority in the marketplace
• Promoting products, services, sales, expertise … I come at it from the UX side – credibility, authenticity
• Blog is ideal for long tail search terms
• More long tail ranking
• Blogs dovetail well with social media efforts like twitter
• Focused silos around specific markets and functions key to the client.

With any new marketing effort, setting expectations for time to see results is crucial for allocating resources and budgeting. We asked, “In what time frame do you typically start to see an increase in measurable SEO performance indicators (links, ranking, traffic) as a result of blogging?” The most common answer was somewhat shorter than expected, 0-3 months.  54% of respondents start to see SEO benefits from blogging very quickly. This short time frame should be very encouraging to those hoping to use blog published content to gain better search engine visibility.

Since many of our respondents were professional search marketers with the ability to properly optimize a blog and promote content to attract links, time frames for results would be very different than someone who does not know how to implement blog SEO tactics.

94% of bloggers reported seeing measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months

Measuring impact is important and certainly, the definitions of success from blogging will vary according to the purpose of the blog. We asked, “What are the most important measures of success when using blogs as part of a SEO effort?”. The responses to this question were fairly evenly divided with increasing company site traffic at the top closely followed by a desire to increase company leads/sales. Other important metrics included inbound links, referrals or leads directly from the blog, web site rankings and blog traffic.

Additional success measures from blogging included many benefits besides search engine optimization, which is very important in our opinion. Starting a blog purely for SEO reasons will make content sustainability difficult in the long run. A blogging strategy must meet meet other goals as well, especially those that involve engaging customers or interactions with readers. Other success measures from blogging include:

Getting a blog implemented in a company is not always an easy task. Resources can be slim as well as expertise and confidence in the ability to achieve a return on effort within a given period of time. We asked, “What have been the most common objections from internal or external clients to implement blogs (with or without SEO benefit)?” This question received the most comments of all in the survey.

67.2% cited resource issues as the most common objection to implementing a blog

Other reasons cited included issues with content sourcing (42%) or simply not seeing the benefit (35%). Regulated industry or legal issues got in the way for 19.3% and lack of measurement round up the answers with 12.9%. Many of the comments about obstacles to blogging centered around time, resources, measurement and a lack of awareness.

On the surface, implementing a blog is straightforward, once you gain approval. The trick is sustainability and reaching measurable goals. Staying on top of what strategies and tactics are successful blogging also takes time and therefore it’s important what resources marketers depend on. We asked, “How do you stay current with blog SEO best practices?”. The overwhelming most popular answer was Other SEO blogs. The good news about that answer is that we publish a list of over 500 SEO and Internet Marketing related blogs on the TopRank BIGLIST.

Other popular resources for staying current with blogging and SEO include: Social Networks & Groups, Conferences, Observations from Testing, Newsletters, Forums and books. Interestingly, Paid Subscription Communities ranked lowest which is a niche community.

92% of respondents feel blogging will continue to be an important content optimization and marketing tactic for the next 3+ years

Interestingly, 8.3% feel blogging will only be important for the rest of 2010.

What is your opinion on the longevity of blogging as an online communications and marketing tool? Do you think the death of blogs is imminent in 2010?  What blogging benefits have you experienced and how have you overcome objections to implementing a blog in your company?

We hope this survey and results have been helpful to you and plan on conducting many other surveys in 2010 to provide additional insights into digital marketing and PR topics. Clearly, there is interest and a need for companies to better understand the strategic and practical applications of business blogging. Specifically, there is benefit in understanding how search and social channels can be combined with core blog content publishing to reach business goals.  We hope to continue providing such insight here at Online Marketing Blog as well as the conferences and corporate training events we’re engaged to speak at.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Survey Results: Impact of Blogging on Search Engine Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com

The Best Pint of Abbot Ale, Ever

Blogs have been touted as effective tools for companies to publish content and demonstrate the conversational side of their corporate personality. Blogs have also long been promoted as a SEO tool. Despite plenty of optimism about blogging, there’s still a lot of mis-information, mis-perceptions and lack of awareness about effective, productive blogging for business.

Take This Blog SEO Survey: If you or your company publishes a blog, please take this quick poll looking into the perceived SEO benefits of blogging. Results will be published on Online Marketing Blog in the next week.  Like a fine pint of Abbot, this survey is smooth, to the point and might just put a smile on your face.

While researching questions for the above poll, I ran an informal #blogseo poll on Twitter yesterday which had 190+ responses within 45 minutes. Here’s a list of everyone that participated. There was an overwhelming interest in direct or indirect SEO benefits from blogging.

And why not? Search engines thrive on and reward web sites that publish content. Blogs are content management systems that make it easy for companies (or anyone) to publish that content. Publishing blog posts creates new web pages that can be linked to and therefore, discovered and ranked by search engines. The more blog posts and links from other sites, the greater the presence in the search results.

Whether blogs were started specifically for SEO or some other purpose, our #blogseo poll showed significant interest in SEO benefits.  Poll participants rated the importance of blogs as part of a SEO strategy between 1=low & 5=high. The average rating was a 4, but some rated blogs as SEO assets as low as 1.5. Here are a few (not all) of the comments Tweeted:

• @seowolf – It really depends on the campaign, the content availability etc. But, as a generalization, I’d say 3.
• @sjachille - 3 to 5 depends on the quality of content
• @SEOAware - it offers much more than seo benefits, so 4-5
• @mjdigital 3 – blogs are good because they are easy and quick to setup and use – but are only as good as their content
• @nathaneide - Depends upon your baseline. If you’re starting from scratch, it’s a 1.5. if you have your ducks in a row, it’s higher.
• @janetdmiller - if you can get one up and running AND keep it current. If not, don’t go down the blog path just for SEO. #blogseo

So it seems that blogs as SEO assets are only as good as their content and if you know what you’re doing. Personally, I agree with that and think that those that do not rate them higher in value for SEO may not be as familiar with the benefits they bring.

That leads to the next question: What SEO functions do blog(s) serve? Some of the most common blog SEO benefits include: Content creation, External and cross links, RSS syndication, Social bookmarking, Community building and Promotion.  Here ‘s what our poll respondents had to say about how blogs help search engine rankings:

• @dericloh – community insights (content topics), content research / testing, conversation monitoring (voice of customer keywords)
• @Psychobel – relationship building from which SEO benefits accrue
• @seowolf – support for offline campaigns
• @mhillaert – drive people back to site with information sharing
• @janetdmiller – Crosslinking, new content for SEO, Twitter fodder, increase bot visits
• @mjdigital – quick turnover of content, community, auto sitemap/pings etc, quick indexing into Google Blogsearch

Obviously, the tactics used with a blog marketing effort should be based on some kind of goal. Some blogs are established to communicate with customers, some for prospective customers, some for the media and industry analysts and some for new hire candidates. No matter what the objective for a public, commercial blog, there’s almost always a need to “get the word out”.

Here are some of the blog SEO tactics and tips that were shared:

• @jachille - use custom fields to create custom META TAGS for optimal remote blogging with desktop apps http://bit.ly/8LwTW8
• @mjdigital - make your titles catchy so they stand out on SM sites, Twitter and bookmark lists
• @LexiConn_Inc - Using 301 redirects for SEO and Ecommerce http://bit.ly/SnG4L
• @goodseo - Urls should reflect the post’s title
• @seowolf - Keep in mind that your blogs are meant to be read by actual people, not the Search Engines, first and foremost
• @silvioporcellan - write periodically about other sites/tools in your industry and let the authors know about it
• @adamsherk - don’t let category and tag pages and the duplication that can come with them get out of control
• @SEOAware - (for beginner) crossmarket services pages with blog posts, optimizing for service location and location service
• @beebow - don’t shoot yourself in the foot by writing a kick ass post with a clever but totally irrelevant title
• @dericloh - Define goal > Insights > Learn > Test > Measure > Repeat
• @janetdmiller - Use SEO plugins in WordPress. They help streamline content editing for SEO, ex: title tag, metas, etc
• @lisabuyer - Frequency and be first to report
• @aimclear - MAKE A BIG ASS LIST~!

Despite clear goals, there are often objectives to adding blogs as part of a digital marketing or PR strategy. Time and resources are the most common issues described by our #blogseo poll respondents. In fact, of all the questions asked, this was the most popular and received the most responses. Here are a few of the obstacles to implementing blogs:

• @mhillaert - Taking the time to write an article, not knowing how to write good content, not knowing what to write about.
• @mjdigital - effort required to maintain valuable content + time and cost of creating custom themes – need to be different
• @TheKenJones - Setting the “right tone” to give promotional marketing benefits (my side) without coming across as bigheaded (theirs)
• @adamsherk - large publishers are sometimes concerned with using various helpful WP plugins for fear of security, reliablility
• @dericloh - Legal issues, regulation, commitment, spam filter / moderation, ownership
• @PRBristolblog - Time & resource are a big barrier to implementing blogs. Need to show the benefits regarding online PR / customer service etc.
• @ericfransen - Client doesn’t have time to provide proper content. I can write all day… but I want client to give me a good start
• @mikemyatt - clients seem to struggle most with content development. Everyone wants a blog – nobody wants to own content creation
• @matt_mcgowan - editorial control
• @beebow - when a client’s industry is either way too niche or way too broad to consistently publish relevant blog posts
• @jfernandez - Fear that blogs are not “professional” and “appropriate for business”
• @seowolf - Waste of time and effort, “we’re a serious company, not some bloggers”, “our customers don’t read blogs”

As an experienced blogger of 6+ years, time management is an issue for everyone, so I don’t think it’s a unique problem to blogging. It’s more a matter of value and expertise. Without a focus and plan, it’s easy for “writer’s block”, a lack of confidence or impatience to kill a blog. On the flip side, developing a process for content creation, feedback to motivate contributors, editorial guidelines, promotion off the blog and measurement can make a blog become and stay successful with a very reasonable amount of effort.

Like any other organized marketing effort, once you identify objectives and develop a content strategy, the task of measuring success keeps the investment in time and resources accountable. A blog started as part of an online public relations effort might focus on how many citations of the blog there are by other blogs and mainstream media web sites. A blog for customers might emphasize comment counts, RSS subscribers and product inquiries. Measurement should tied to goals and you can’t “score” a goal if you don’t know how or what to measure.

Here are some of the most important blog metrics cited in the #blogseo poll:

• @seowolf - The metrics really depend on the campaign. Generally, awareness indicators, the main site’s TrustRank.
• @silvioporcellan - on-site blog: position of articles for good keywords / off-site: links counted in WMT
• @dericloh - It depends on the business goal & objective for utilizing the blog (i.e. reduce customer support cost, voc, etc)
• @beebow - conversions, unique views, rank in SERPs #blogseo
• @mhillaert - number and quality of comments, statistics, ranking as leader in industry, retweets #blogseo
• @matt_mcgowan - conversions/engagement (time on site, subscriptions, comments, purchases, repeat visits), referrals, new visitors
• @ty_walker - When what you tell people to do actually works for them. Readers won’t be readers long if your material isn’t practical.
• @adamsherk - search referral traffic, inbound links, comments, engagement, social media sharing, RSS subscriptions
• @Mel66 - Subscribers, visits, comments, rankings, engagement (quality of comments)
• @ericfransen - Conversions, Engagements, Becoming your Industries Authoritative website #blogseo
• @mjdigital - community – subscriptions, comments, uptake, retweets etc A blog is nothing if no-one reads it + shares/acts on it
• @admrebak - obviously traffic to web page, bottom line, awareness, community growth, company image #blogseo

Companies that have started a blog often fall into comfortable schedules, since that’s the easiest way to manage tasks. Make checklists and processes and get people into predictable routines. However, staying competitive means staying current.

One way to stay current with blog SEO and blogging is to check out TopRank’s BIGLIST of search marketing blogs. What you read on other blogs should certainly be confirmed through your own testing and observations of social and web analytics.

That said, the bloggers from or poll shared a few of their favorite methods of staying current with blog SEO best practices:

• @mjdigital - reading seo blogs, following key SEO’s, analysing Google Analytics, seomoz
• @seowolf - RSS reader, using StumbleUpon topically, newsletters, Twitter and, occasionally, Facebook.
• @matt_mcgowan - events and keeping up on my reading #blogseo
• @michelleberdeal - Constantly listening to webinars & podcasts on this topic, reading blogs, researching, testing, measuring results
• @SEOAware - TONS of reading daily, research, experimenting, monitoring results, watching google, constant education
• @lisabuyer - Constant online reading and conferences
• @JDEbberly - I stay current with SEO practices by reading your (Online Marketing Blog) authoritative blog
• @beebow - read www.toprankblog.com attend conferences, regularly read posts by respected SEO/SEM/SMO bloggers. #sblogseo
• @aimclear - we do rigorous Daily Reading & Training to keep current, big http://bit.ly/6EOWmI
• @mhillaert -  authoritative blogs, networking, etc. Mostly blogs. #blogseo
• @janetdmiller - 1) Read blogs, 2) Attend conferences, 3) Discuss with others (twitter, etc.), 4) Test

Thank you to all the Tweet Poll #blogseo participants who you can easily find and follow on the #BlogSEO chat Twitter list.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | The Best Blog SEO Survey Ever | http://www.toprankblog.com

You’ve heard the stories from the tech echo chamber. Posts proclaiming blogging dead and RSS too slow have been circulating around the web for the last year or so.  And yet the blogosphere remains alive and kicking, despite the early adopter pontification.

Not yet running a blog or syndicating your content through RSS feeds?  Your competition certainly is, and if you’re not there you’re missing out on a vital area that can boost your SEO efforts.

Joshua Palau, VP, Search, Razorfish moderates this panel of industry leaders (including TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden) to explore the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization:

• Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
• Dixon Jones, Managing Director, Receptional LTD
• Sally Falkow, President, PRESSfeed
• Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
• Jim Hedger, Lead Blogger, Webmaster Radio

Each panelist gave a presentation, followed by a brief Q&A:

Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
Avoid the “me too” blog – just because someone else has done it doesn’t mean you can do it just like them too.

Why hasn’t your blog taken off?  It probably looks and sounds like everyone else’s blog.  Develop the mindset that blogging is not just a tactical SEO project, it’s now a standard part of what you need to do for business.

Strategize how to move new blogs from experiments to mainstream, important marketing elements quickly.

It’s all about content

Develop a long term editorial battle plan to maintain quality.  Use your analytics to guide your editorial choices.  Build your keyword list early and revisit it frequently.

Tend your investment – address comments in a timely manner.  Encourage deeper reading by showing “most popular posts” and “related posts.”  Prune the clutter and refresh the look, as needed.  If it’s not adding value, get rid of it.

Leverage your readers

Plan to support your content with social media:  use Twitter Facebook, etc. to announce posts and expand reach.  Treat each post as a “mini campaign” – in other words, spend a good amount of time making them significant.  Results may be less frequent, but better reach for content.

Dixon Jones, Managing Director, Receptional LTD
Building links on blogs is vital to get them to rank.  One tactic is to build widgets that add value in order to get quality links with keyword rich anchor text.  This can be done through things like adding widgets that are interesting, useful or unique.

If you are going to blog, you need to link to people/articles within your industry particularly if you are using WordPress blogs because other bloggers will get pinged.

Sally Falkow, President, PRESSfeed
If you have a web page with an RSS feed, Google considers it a blog.  By adding content through feeds, you are reaching people external of your site and connect with end users directly.

All of the social web content is in feeds, so you want to be a part of that by creating content into a feed so others can pick it up and republish it.  Search engines like feeds, with constantly updated content in a feed.

If you put a feed on your site within 4-5 months, it is possible to become one of the largest traffic drivers to your site.

Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
Lee shared 8 linking tactics used to make TopRank blog a success:

1. Quality out quality in – you get back what you put out there
2. Link out – connect with others in the industry who are relevant  and connected
3. Make a big list – aggregate compelling people or blogs within a niche
4. Get on “other” lists – create a page where you talk about this recognition
5. Make a killer tool – make something linkable that is niche-specific
6. Write guest posts – will get you in front of different audiences
7. Power up ReTweets – make it easy for people to ReTweet your blog content
8. Network OFFLINE – difficult to get a phenomenal amount of success unless you leverage offline aspects as well.  It’s unbelievable what can happen if you can cement those relationships that have been formed online, offline.

Bonus tip:  dynamically embed a hard link to the post in your RSS feed (so syndicators and scrapers to link back to the original post).

Here’s Lee’s entire presentation hosted on Slideshare:

Jim Hedger, Lead Blogger at Webmaster Radio
Blogs and feeds are the fine arts of wide-casting to a narrow audience.

Distribution is everything – but how to distribute tens of thousands of old files?  Simple – use WordPress.  Go from old proprietary systems to WordPress and you will reap the benefits of an open source community that gives you the ability to do almost anything.  Also, WordPress is highly SEO friendly and customizable to work exactly how you want it.

Titles, tags, descriptive text and the RSS subscription link are all important signals to the engines.  Don’t forget these as standard elements of all content.

Feeds also help you rank quickly in the engines when you are frequently adding fresh content to a web site.

Q and A

How can you avoid duplicate content in multiple blogs?

If you are keeping multiple blogs with the same content don’t duplicate:  either funnel people from one blog to the other or if you are going to post on another blog via syndication, be sure to link back to the original content.

Can you keep a blog if you do not necessarily have the bandwidth internally (ie – you’re a small business with no time)

Think of yourself as a publisher, create an editorial guide – get organized and follow your plan to achieve success.  It’s highly worth the effort – the ROI over time will only go up, if done correctly.  From a content creation perspective, there is probably a lot of content you are already creating.  See what you can re-purpose and re-use.  Also, every company has a story – really think about what that is and what makes your company compelling and unique.

If you can write good content and new, how do you best start?

Embrace social media, if you create things worth talking about people will share them.

Learn more search media marketing and search engine strategies from 2009 SES SJ coverage by TopRank Online Marketing

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | SES SJ: SEO Through Blogs And Feeds | http://www.toprankblog.com

These are specific, practical questions and answers about optimizing both blogs and feeds for better search performance from some of the smartest blog and Feed SEO experts on the web. 

If you’re a Twitter fan, please ReTweet: 37 Tips for optimizing blogs and feeds:   http://cli.gs/blogseotips

Please share 3 practical SEO tips business blogs should implement:

Rebecca Lieb: 

• Have a content strategy, and arrange it around your topic/focus. A blog isn’t a one-off, it’s an ongoing project and you need to populate it with relevant content on an ongoing basis. 
• Don’t forget to optimize images, video and audio files with relevant, keyword-rich metadata. They’re content, too! 
• Don’t forget to link – outbound links beget inbound links!

Michel Leconte:  Here are three things I’d consider for you to help build traffic and ranking:  

• Add automatically deep links to your RSS feed footer by using RSS Footer
• Set your feedburner options to optimize click tracking for SE rankings / Use Mybrand services  or  Pingshot.
• Invite contributors to participate in your blog, and play the news game; set the right folder/article url/xml newsmap structure, and submit your articles to Google News.

Sally Falkow:

• Keep your overall SEO strategy in mind – put keywords in your blog posts. 
• Make sure your feed is operational and that you have the autodiscover code for the feed in place.
• Create original content that engages your audience – content they can’t get anywhere else.

Michael Gray:

• Write clear KWD rich titles like “How to Plan a Las Vegas Vacation” not clever ones like “My Top 10 Must Sees When Descending into Sin City”. 
• Be timely and go with current events, write about tax issues in March and April not September and October. 
• Engage the community with open ended posts or questions.

What are a few of the most common mistakes you see bloggers make when it comes to SEO?

Sally Falkow:  Not following an SEO strategy – just blogging without a plan

Michael Gray:

• Category and URL structure most people make it much more complicated than it needs to be with years, months, days, and categories all in the URL, stick with one, I happen to prefer categories. 
• Don’t abuse and stuff categories and tags, try to set it up so posts are only in one category and have a few tags.

Rebecca Lieb: 

• Not paying attention to relevant keywords. I mean, don’t go overboard and write in all keywords, all the time. But have  an idea what keywords people user to find your area of coverage and use them not only in body copy, but in headlines, too. 
• Business blogs must allow comments. There are plenty of unidirectional communications channels, but your blog shouldn’t be one of them.

Michel Leconte:

• Not having your own domain 
• Using theme templates that subordinates content to navigation making it difficult to index 
• URL not aligned with the blog post’s title

What are some of the best link building tactics for blogs?

Michael Gray:

• Detailed “How to” or problem solving posts. Not everyone will ever need a well thought out and written “how to hang wallpaper” post with pictures and videos, but lots of people will like it, bookmark it and link to it. 
• Be exceptional, exceptionally funny, exceptionally insightful, exceptionally opionated, exceptionally anything works. You’ll never stand out in the crowd if you’re afraid to stand up, be noticed and rock the boat a little.

Michel Leconte:  In my opinion, creating compelling, timely content is the best “catalyst” for link building. 

• Be passionate and opinionated
• Follow the news cycle 
• Network with other bloggers to attain a critical mass of readers interested in your subject matter

Rebecca Lieb: 

• Don’t be stingy. Link, and you will be linked back to – eventually.  
• Don’t forget to link relevant text. Don’t say “you can read more about it here,” but rather “this interview with John Doe is useful.” Adding context to a link helps readers and search engines alike. 
• Create a good old-fashioned blog roll. 
• Don’t forget to build your own links – link between your Web site and your blog in both directions.

Sally Falkow:  Great content!  Find other bloggers who cover the subject and offer them exclusive, interesting content.

Please explain how RSS plays into improving search engine rankings & visibility

Michel Leconte:  As David Gilbraith puts it, Search Engines seek to answer three questions; how relevant, how fresh and how much. RSS helps answer the how fresh question by design; it is therefore well-adapted to dialogue with search engines. RSS also helps gain link currency and traffic from deep links. It takes some time to monitor and makes sure everyone plays along when syndicating your content, but it’s worth it. Finally, work on distribution and usability, with one click subscriptions/auto-discovery/RSS directories/Email subscription, full text and snippet format, and a limited set of meaningful content options.

Rebecca Lieb: RSS is an SEO dream – links, syndication, feeds into news and Web sites. IF SEO is about getting your content “out there,” RSS is like getting it out there on the bullet train.

Michael Gray:  By publishing full feeds you will keep your users happier and grow faster. By embeding links in your posts and RSS feeds you build links back to your site from the people who like to scrape full feeds.

Sally Falkow:  RSS is like the blood vessels of the Internet.  They carry the content and make it easily seen and read by others

Search engines like RSS Feeds.  So your content gets seen and indexed faster.  Also when you syndicate content with links in it, the RSS Feed makes it available to other sites.  When your content appears on those  sites the links point back to you.

Bonus Blog SEO Question and Tip: 

Michael Gray:  There isn’t a magic number of posts you need to make per day, week or month, but there is a magic number of quality posts you have to make and that’s at least one. Quality over quantity will always keep the readers of your blog engaged and coming back for more.

Michel Leconte:  Will RSS replace Web crawling by search engines one day?  

Web crawling is very inefficient. Crawling with the hope of finding something new is kind of a depressing idea to me. It makes me think of the last time I was looking for a specific shirt in my closet.  One of the reasons why that WordPress and other blogging platforms took off was their ability to ping search engines to quickly make it into the index. RSS delivers only fresh content/data at the time of publishing, which makes a lot of sense from a scalability stand point. With improved standards, RSS will have a bigger say in the future of search engine, rankings, and obviously optimizing these rankings.

Sally Falkow:  How can RSS feeds ‘socialize’ your content?

If you content remains on your site it is static and gets seen by only your visitors. Once it is in a feed it is seen by bloggers, other sites, search engines, news and feed aggregators.  These other websites all have their own visitors.  They see your content on other sites and many of them will save and share your content into sites like digg, stumbleupon, twitter etc.  This gives more visibility and build more links.

Rebecca Lieb:  I’m going to lob that question back to the readers. If you’ve got something to say, and you want it to be found online, why wouldn’t you incorporate blogs and feeds into an SEO strategy?

Thank you Rebecca, Michaeal, Sally and Michel, great info! 

You’ll get a lot more information on Blog and feed optimization than this at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.  If you’re not registered for SES New York, get on it here. 

Special SES New York Discount!!!

For Online Marketing Blog Readers, SES has graciously extended a 15% discount for conference attendance. Just use this code when registering: NY15TRR

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | 37 Tips for Optimizing Blogs and Feeds – SES New York | http://www.toprankblog.com

Brian is a fantastic writer and marketer, recovering attorney and someone that over 50,000 people have decided to subscribe to at copyblogger.com - one of the most popular blogs on the internet.  Brian has a lot of what people want: knowledge, talent and success.  Read on to tap into some of that Copyblogger goodness.

How did you go from being a lawyer to an internet entrepreneur?

Easy… I hated practicing law and I was fascinated by the Internet. The transition was extreme I suppose, but I always had a thing for writing, so I started creating online content over a decade ago. Now it’s just part of me.  

How much does SEO play into your blog marketing efforts with copyblogger.com and the other sites you work with?

Well, it’s absolutely vital and yet absolute optimization never happens too soon for us. I’m a firm believer in building trusted authority sites, and sometimes that means foregoing the best keyword optimization in order to attract more links and subscribers. Once you have that trust (with people and Google) it’s easy to dive in and optimize certain pages or sections of a site.

What are the most common mistakes you see people make that get in the way of blogs or web sites from having better search visibility?

I think it goes back to my last answer… Obsessing over the perfect keywords in your title before you have any readers or any links is backwards these days. Google wants to rank trusted brands highly, and creating a brand goes way beyond keyword research and placement. 

How important is genuinely good writing to having a successful blog?

It depends both on the audience and the author. In some areas being a great writer will put you ahead of the pack. In others, people are more interested in what you have to share with them, warts and all. But how you say things will always matter, whether you’re considered a “great writer” or not. That’s where copywriting skills come in.

Do you see links and buzz worthy content as a cart before the horse situation? ie, in order to get those links, you need to have something worth linking to.

The content and the value has to be there first. People think this is about “gaming” or whatever. Some people think having any strategy at all is “gaming,” and that’s fine for them. To me, it’s about solid value and solid strategy… both are necessary to achieve online marketing goals. 

If you were limited to 2 or 3 things blog owners should always do to optimize and promote their blogs, what would they be? ie, what are 2 or 3 of your best blog optimization/marketing tips?

Well, it’s been said over and over, but I can’t say anything new. It’s about a unique voice, unique value, and working to make a connection with the audience. It’s not easy, but those who truly work at it will succeed.

What are some of your most effective tactics for writing blog post headlines?

It boils down to making a relevant and compelling promise… one that your target reader can’t refuse–and then fulfilling that promise with your content. If you’ll forgive a link, I’ve written a ton about headlines. 

What do you think are the most important success measurements for a corporate blog, a content blog, a personal blog? (RSS Subscribers, web traffic, repeat web traffic, advertising rev, consulting)

It really depends on your revenue model, but frankly, my answer remains the same regardless–subscribers. It can be email (and in most niches, it still should be) or RSS, but getting people to “raise their hand” and pay attention to you on a regular basis is golden.

What resources can you recommend for keeping current with blogging, monetization and internet marketing?

Well, for starters, you. Also, a lot of really great stuff is being shared on Twitter these days if you follow relevant folks. And I suppose we manage a decent tip or two over at Copyblogger.

Here’s the best advice I can give on this… learn from everyone. Study marketers you hate as well as marketers you agree with. Don’t close your mind to anything and you’ll come out with a more well-rounded toolbox of tactics and strategies for online marketing. 

 Thanks Brian!

Check out Brian on the web at: Copyblogger, Teaching Sells, DIY Themes and on Twitter

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | The Copyblogger Files – Interview with Brian Clark | http://www.toprankblog.com

Here are five tips for successful business blog optimization benefits in the long run:

1. Find a practical purpose for starting a blog. There are many reasons why companies would benefit from starting and publishing a blog. Some might use blog software as a content management system for an online newsroom or to archive newsletters to the web.

Other blog applications include: aggregating industry news, publishing ongoing product development information, improving customer relations, building thought leadership or improving onlne marketing and sales.  Identifying a specific business goal that can be facilitated by the creation, publishing and promotion of blog content should be the first step.

Whether the goal is to better connect with existing customers and reduce support costs or to attract more media coverage to improve indusry reputation, there should be a specific business goal for the blog. SEO can be used to further that objective through improved search visibility.

2. Optimize templates initially and content on an ongoing basis. As dynamically generated web sites, blogs take information stored to a database and push that information through templates which generate the web pages or blog posts we read in a web browser.

Optimization of a blog at the template level will pass on benefits to all pages of the blog. For example, the use of blog post titles in the URLs rather than an id number. Or posting distinct title tags separate from the on page titles.

Blog content optimization means leveraging a keyword glossary to allow company bloggers to make informed choices about what phrases to use in titles, categories, body copy, anchor text links, tags, image alt text and others. This is an activity that often gets diluted if there isn’t a quality assurance effort, oversight editorially or persistent attention to SEO.

3. Plan editorial and source content. Unlike traditional publications, blogs do not typically have editorial calendars but why not?  Use categories as an indication for the topics the blog should be posting about. Category keywords should support the business goals defined in the blog’s objectives.

Here are some simple steps for managing blog content, long term:  Create a keyword glossary, much like you would for a website SEO project. Identify an editorial guide as well as post types and key topics. Assign a blog champion, someone that “owns” the success/failure of the blog. The blog champion will provide content and editorial oversight as well as recruit other contributors.

The blog champion performs another important function, feedback to the contributors. This goes beyond a simple “thank you” but may also include reporting on the number of comments on posts contributed, inbound links, increases in RSS subscribers and mentions of the blog post on other blogs. Providing individual as well as overall feedback to contributors helps them see what impact their efforts are making.

4. Socialize.

Blogs are a big part of what makes up social media, so it’s important that bloggers are social for a successful blogging effort. A few of the ways blogs can be social include:

• Comments – be sure to respond to commments on your blog quickly
• Links out to other blogs – Blog software like WordPress will notify the blog owner when others link in. Besides providing readers a link to a useful resource, getting the attention of a prominent and/or influential blogger by linking to them can result in being mentioned in a post with a link back.
• Trackbacks are the mutual link exchange that can happen when one blog links to another.
• Widgets and polls/surveys can be effective social tools for a blog, because they allow interaction and direct feedback.
• Reading and commenting on other blogs is very important for the success of a blog to connect with other influential information sources on your topic. Bloggers are also more keen to network with each other than they are with non-bloggers.
• Social networking tools like Facebook and communication tools like Twitter can be effectively used to socialize a blog by crowdsourcing the network for content as well as a channel for promoting new content. Recognizing contributors and aggregating resources is a win for everyone.

5. Measure and promote blog success – In order for a blogging effort of any kind to be successful, there needs to be an objective. Ideally an objective that helps reach a particular business goal. Once that goal for the blog is indentified, it’s important to take a benchmark measurement to understand where you are starting from.

Monitoring mentions of the blog in real time with basic tools like Google Alerts and TweetBeep can be effective discovery tools in finding fans of your blog. Robust monitoring tools such as BuzzLogic, Techrigy or Radian6 can be helpful for monitoring multiple social media channels.

Discovering trending of keywords within blogs or services like Twitter can present opportunistic content marketing situations. If a term is observed as becoming increasingly popular, the blog conducting the monitoring can choose to create more content and engage in link building to encourage high ranking for those terms.

Besides monitoring, it’s important measure the specific goals set out for the blog using web analytics.

As the data and success metrics are collected, be sure to package the information for reporting upstream in the organization. ROI on social media marketing efforts, including blogging, can be challenging. However, if the blog is attracting any kind of popular keyword phrase traffic from organic search, it can be compared to the costs to achieve those same positions and visitors with pay per click. The resulting comparison should offer an estimated a dollar value of organic search traffic.

Another valuation method for blogs is when the blog facilitates media coverage, including other blogs.  If a company hires a public relations firm to conduct blogger and media relations, it costs money and that investment can be boiled down to a value per pickup.  If publishing content on the blog results in being cited, linked or mentioned by a popular blog or publication, it should be tracked and a dollar value assigned.  Such ROI associations from blogging can vary depending on the purpose of the blog ranging from lowering customer service costs to saving recruiter fees for attracting new employees.

The other type of reporting that is important for the longevity of a blog and the ongoing optimization effort is feedback to those that make it happen. A blog SEO effort cannot be successful if there is no one to write posts. Therefore, it’s important to keep contributors motivated by keeping them informed on the progress of the blog in reaching overall goals as well as the effect ofo their individual contributions.

Wrap up:

For a successful business blogging effort that leverages search engine optimization, it’s important that the blog serves a functional purpose intented to help the business reach a particular goal. SEO is involved in order to extend the reach and “discoverability” of the blog.

Blog optimization is both a one time event with the templates but is also an ongoing process involving keyword glossaries that help determine post level keyword usage, internal anchor text and off site anchor text.  Running out of ideas and people to contribute to the blog can mean certain death, so be creative with content sourcing and formats. Listen to what blog readers respond to and give feedback on to guide editorial.

Blog software offers many social features. Use them! Grow a network that leverages the blog as resource and as a way to recognize contributors.  Monitor real time content opportunities as well as blog analytics so you can offer the kind of feedback that motivates continued contributions both from the C-Suite in the form of funding and from the B-Suite in the form of content and comments.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | 5 Tips for Successful Blog Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com

Yesterday I presented at SES Chicago in a session on SEO Through Blogs and Feeds with Stephan Spencer and Sally Falkow. I went first and presented the slideshow embedded below, a presentation in two parts:

1. Why blogs created solely for SEO purposes will inevitably fail.
2. Tips on how to create a successfully optimized company blog that will last.

My presentation was followed up by Sally who talked about Feeds and distributon opportunities. The final presenter was Stephan, who had 100 or so slides (joking) on WordPress SEO but got through about 20 before the Q/A which was handled by Rebecca Lieb.

Ironically, I’m not sure anyone blogged the session but some did a bit of Twittering. Hopefully the presentation below is helpful. I know many companies are looking at blogging for many reasons and after 5 years of blogging and providing blog consulting services, TopRank has gained a tremendous amount of insight.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | SES Chicago: SEO Through Blogs and Feeds | http://www.toprankblog.com

Unfortunately, the advice gets filtered and distorted, not unlike what happens in the game “telephone” kids play. Pretty soon one or more blogs are implemented for the sole purpose and expectation of improving search engine visibility and nothing else. At least nothing else that’s accountable.

What’s wrong with this picture?   Blogs started solely for SEO objectives will inevitably fail.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. Lack of planning and oversight – After the honeymoon of starting a blog wears off, those tasked with writing content often get distracted by their other responsibilities. Bit by bit, posts look less and less like keyword optimized web pages and sink back to the familiar writing styles common to public relations and corporate marketing. Gone are the keywords that consumers are searching on. Gone is the traffic that used to come from search engines.

If SEO efforts persist, they can get sloppy without ongoing oversight either by an outsite SEO consultant or an internal blog champion (more about that in our next post). Keyword usage in blog posts can become disparate or worse, evolve into a keyword stuffing exercise.

2. No passion for the topic – With over 100 million blogs indexed by Technorati, it’s a wonder what happened to the 90% or more than have been abandoned or that don’t post more often than every 4 months. It takes commitment, thought out ideas and a sincere interest in a topic to be able to blog about it on an ongoing basis over the long term. 

Can you imagine watching a 30 minute TV show or 2 hour movie you’re not interested in? How long does that last? How about a job you’re not interested in? Do you really excel at it? Do you do the best job possible and and do you stick with it? No, no and no.

As a result, bloggers who are not personally interested in a topic will encounter blogger’s block quickly and with a shallow level of knowledge on what’s being blogged about, readers lose interest quickly and do not return, subscribe or link.

3. SEO as we’ve known it is a dying breed – The loophole based SEO tactics of yore that brought incremental ranking advantages are being efficiently dealt with by search engines. So are paid links.  SEO will always have value of course, because as long as content can be searched on it can be optimized.

However, when it comes to blogs, consumer information discovery trends are involving social networks and social media at an increasing rate. Recommendations are competing with search. When looking at the web analytics of our blog and client blogs, social media traffic is in the top 5 referring sources of traffic. Blogs are social and social media sources will become increasingly important for many business blogging efforts in the coming year.

So, what can a company do to build upon and benefit from, the compounding equity that grows with long term blogging and SEO efforts? I’ll be answering that question specifically in tomorrow’s post on 5 Tips for Successful Blog Optimization efforts.

In the meantime, have you started a blog only to lose interest or stop contributing to it? What was your reason? What would you do differently?

Additional resources on blogging and blog marketing:

25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog

5 Reasons Why Business Blogs Fail

Blog Optimization

Best Blog Analytics Software

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | 3 Reasons Why Blogs for SEO Fail | http://www.toprankblog.com

TopRank Online Marketing will have two speakers presenting on two panels at SES Chicago this week.  

On Tuesday, Senior Account Manager Jolina Pettice (who recently spoke on a panel with Yahoo’s Ron Belanger and Anne Kennedy at DPAC) will be speaking on a session about how to use Public Relations tactics to improve SEO results.  On Wednesday I will be speaking on a panel about Blog SEO.

Here are the session details. We look forward to seeing you there!

Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - 2:45pm-3:45pm 
“Turning PR Efforts into SEO Results”

Most organizations are focused solely on how SEO impacts marketing and advertising and are failing to take advantage of the unique and very impactful results that are generated when SEO is applied to public relations. Organizations that fail to integrate PR into SEO efforts stand to miss out on a valuable opportunity. This session will provide real-life examples to show how organizations can achieve maximum results for any communications campaign through natural search optimization of press releases.

Moderator: 

• Andy Atkins-Krüger, Managing Director, WebCertain Europe Ltd

Speakers:

• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR
• Sarah Skerik, Vice President, Distribution Services, PR Newswire
• Jiyan Wei, Product Manager, PR Web, Vocus
• Jolina Pettice, Senior Account Manager, TopRank Marketing

In this session on how to leverage SEO tactics with public relations efforts, TopRank’s Jolina Pettice will present an excerpt of our Journalist’s Use of Search Survey, shed light on the difference between SEO for lead generation vs SEO to attract journalists searching for experts to include in news stories and offer several news content optimization tips.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008 – 10:30am-11:45am
“SEO Through Blogs & Feeds”

Not yet running a blog? Not syndicating your content through web feeds? Then you’re missing out on an important area that can help your overall SEO efforts. Learn more about the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization.

Moderator:

• Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ

Speakers:

• Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
• Sally Falkow, President, PRESSfeed
• Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts, LLC

In this session Sally will discuss feed (RSS) optimization, Stephan will undoubtedly cover the optimization of blogs and I will be discussing the top 5 reasons why blogs started with SEO in mind fail, miserably.  And 5 ways to succeed.

Be sure to check out these sessions while you’re at SES and if you blog either or both of these sesions, please @ or dm me at @leeodden on Twitter. I will be absolutely certain to mention your coverage on Twitter and in our conference roundup here at Online Marketing Blog.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | TopRank Brings 2 Speakers on 2 Panels at SES Chicago | http://www.toprankblog.com

I wonder how many people reading this blog right now work for a company that:

1) Doesn’t have a blog
2) Has a blog but it’s on life support
3) Is considering blogging but not sure where to start
4) Has been blogging for a while, but wants to make it to the next level

Well, I’ve got some really good news.  On the heels of the OMMA New York conference Sept 18-19 comes Blog World Expo in Las Vegas Sept 20-21. What better place to have the world’s largest conference dedicated to blogging than the city that never sleeps because most of the active bloggers I know don’t sleep either.

TopRank has been tasked to source speakers and moderate a panel at Blog World Expo on “Search Engine Optimization and New Media”. We have an impressive panel with Michael Gray aka graywolf, Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com and Stephen Spencer of Netconcepts. An impressive lineup on it’s own, these marketing and blogging pros will be joined by a stellar group of speakers on all aspects of blogging. This is a must-attend event for social media and online marketing types.

Here are the session details:

Search Engine Optimization, SEM & New Media
Executive Track
Saturday, Sept. 20, 2008
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Room 232
Las Vegas Convention Center

Unlike most other sessions that focus on presentations, this panel will be all about Q/A and discussion.

There will be representatives from the biggest and best known brands that blog at this event including: Southwest Airlines, SixApart, Walmart, Nielsen, Intel, U.S. Army, Yahoo, Comcast, AdRants, Kodak, Dell, Ford, Cisco and many more. Here’s the speakers list.

I’m really looking forward to the session with Michael, Brian and Stephen as well as connecting with a ton of other like minded blogging types including:

Stephanie Agresta, Lisa Barone, David Berkowitz, Rohit Bhargava, Toby Bloomberg, Susan Bratton, Michael Brito, Chris Brogan, Rich Brooks, Rick Calvert, Valerie Combs, Paul Chaney, Jason Falls, Steve Hall, Tris Hussey, Guy Kawasaki, Jim Kukral, Scott Monty, Elisa Camahort Page, Steve Rubel, Muhammad Saleem, Jeremy Schoemaker, Robert Scoble, Brian Solis, Dave Taylor, Robyn Tippins, Denise Wakeman, Des Walsh, Kristie Wells and even more new people I haven’t met yet.

This will be my first time attending Blog World Expo and I can tell by the content lineup, speakers, sponsors and the past attendees I’ve talked to, that it’s going to be one heck of an event. I’ll be doing some blogging during the event, so be sure to watch for a series of posts.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | Still Trying to Figure Out a Blog for Your Business? Blog World Expo | http://www.toprankblog.com

Even our dear WordPress which so many search engine optimization professionals sincerely love and prefer as a blogging platform, is misinformed or at least, subject to making sweeping generalizations. This is the “banned” category:

And here are some examples of blogs that are banned from WordPress.com (all of these fall under the general heading of “spam blogs”, or splogs, and we will be deleted as soon as we find them or they get reported):

• Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it’s gone!
• SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.
• Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (”Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category.
• Warez blogs: Blogs that promote pirated copies of ebooks, software packages, music, movies, games, etc

C’mon WordPress.com, just because some overzealous SEO noobs used (likely experimented and exploited) your free blog hosting service at wordpress.com doesn’t mean all SEO blogs are suspect and shady.

With literally hundreds and hundreds of reviews we’ve done on SEO blogs over the past year, I think I have a fairly good sense about what most SEO bloggers are writing about and the vast majority are on the up and up. I suspect I wouldn’t need to look far to find a sinister “Politics” or “Personal” blog or two or two hundred on the WordPress.com service. That said, I’m not sure whether any of the 500 or so SEO blogs on our BIGLIST are hosted at WordPress.com. Of course not, they were probably banned – LOL.

The warning is, of course, directed towards blogs setup at WordPress.com and not blogs using the downloadable WordPress application. Regardless, WordPress is such a great piece of software, this just seems a bit over the top. So here’s my suggested alternative:

SEO blogs: Blogs that provide tips, news and insights into how web site and blog owners can make it easier for search engines and users to find and interact with their sites resulting in improved traffic levels and repeat visits.

Then they can make a statement against blogs in general that provide mis-information or violate published policies instead of making such a sweeping statement. What do you think? Am I too “glass half full” and idealistic in my characterization of SEO blogs?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2008. | WordPress.com and SEO Blogs – Love or Hate? | http://www.toprankblog.com

On day three, the last day of sessions at WebmasterWorld Pubcon here in Vegas, I participated on a panel called, “Search and Blogging Reporters Forum” with Rand Fishkin and Andy Beal.

Moderation duties handled by Mike McDonald. Basically, it was a round table-style discussion about blogging in the SEO industry as well as blogging as a marketing tool. There were some good points about using blogs as a public relations tool as well as some debate about hosting team blogs separately or all under the company domain name.

There was some nice back and forth with Andy and Rand plus great questions from Mike and the audience.

Fortunately, there was a celebrity crew of bloggers covering this session including Lisa Barone, Tamar Weinberg and Jane Copland so you can read more details on their respective posts.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Pubcon Session: Blogger Reporter Panel | http://www.toprankblog.com

When talking with TopRank or M&O Account Teams about new clients, it is inevitable that I will ask if there is a blog involved. There are simply too many advantages to enabling a web site with fresh, themed content that is well structured for SEO benefits and that also offers a great platform for creative promotion, not to consider it in the online marketing mix. However, the mis-perceptions about what a blog is and is not abound, even with self-described “blogging experts”.

Despite that, I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question for a company to ask: “Why should we have a blog and what will it do for us?” Answering that question in the most effective way possible starts with understanding the business and marketing goals of the company. Too many SEOs and blogging consultants focus on the mechanical capabilities of a blog and not on the business goals that can be met.

Blogs are simply tools and are only as effective as the programs and people put in place to use them. The degree to which company goals can be met with the applications and current/future benefits of a blog are what we use to determine whether a business blog is appropriate or not.

Effective marketing initiatives have goals and measures of success. Blogs as marketing and PR tools are no different. Some of the measurable effects from business blogging include:

• Media attention
• Speaking requests
• Customer loyalty
• Inbound links to the blog
• Search engine ranking for the corporate site
• Corporate website traffic
• Leads/sales initiated
• Volume of blog traffic
• Technorati and other credible rankings
• Search engine ranking for the blog
• Increased company visibility within the industry
• Increased media coverage
• Improved customer loyalty
• Increased sales leads/revenue/new customers

If the majority of these measures (although each is not equally valuable) can support a company’s online marketing and/or PR objectives, then it makes sense to continue down the blogging path. Other considerations include:

• Hosting platform and limitations
• URL considerations – sub directory, sub domain, different domain
• Client side IT support/requirements/limitations
• Client side blog editorial and strategic ownership
• Client side content sources
• Meshing the blog content schedule with the company/web site marketing plan and communications/messaging objectives
• Client side resource allocation for research, writing, media creation and editorial
• Coordinated promotion of key blog posts
• Coordination of blog posts with offline, search marketing or media relations outreach initiatives
• Blog software, template customization and optimization
• Blog productivity plug-ins and anti SPAM tools
• Third party widgets and tools
• Training on blogging best practices
• Keyword glossaries
• Blogger relations and community outreach
• Developing a social network, profile development and channels of distribution/promotion
• Ongoing blog promotion – RSS, SEO, blog PR, social media
• Blog analytics and monitoring
• Blogging policy, legal considerations and copyright issues
• Trackback and comment policy
• Comment handling
• Quantifying the expense for outside consultants and internal resources for blogging and making estimates for a return on investment

This is a long list and many blogging consultants will tell you how easy it is to throw up a blog and they’re right. It IS easy to go to blogger.com or wordpress.com and create a blog within minutes. So why all the “considerations” you ask?

Things that are easy to get into are typically easy to get out of. The vast majority of blogs started are abandoned. TopRank’s point of view is that it doesn’t make sense to start a blog unless we do so in strategic support of a company’s business goals. With the potential for significant impact on business, marketing and PR goals, it makes sense to do all that you can to ensure success – making sure all bases are covered.  Blogging is new territory for most companies and being able to do so with a deeply experienced marketing partner can save a lot of headache, money, resources, time and embarrassment from failure.

Make no mistake, I am personally very biased towards the business building and marketing benefits of business blogs. Using a blog to promote our TopRank brand over the past 3, going on 4 years, has had considerable results that we’re very happy with. When an agency that offers business blog consulting services can successfully implement for themselves the services and consulting offered to clients, it says a lot about the agency’s capabilities.

As it goes with successful visibility on search engines for SEO related terms, the same goes for successful blog marketing programs with the adage, “If you can do it for yourself, you can do it for others”. What I would add to that is that it must be for the right reasons, expectations and measures of success or don’t bother.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Defining Business Blogging Success | http://www.toprankblog.com

As part of a blog optimization panel I participated in during a recent conference in Australia, I decided to forgo the bulleted list of blog plugins and recommendations that you typically see on such sessions in favor of something more personal.

The presentation focused on 3 of the biggest mistakes we’ve made with Online Marketing Blog in the past 3 years, why we made them (and why others do too), what we learned, what you can do to avoid them and the expected outcomes.

This format was well received, so I thought I’d share them here.

Mistake Number One: Goals.

When we started the first version of Online Marketing Blog in December of 2003, there was no specific business goal other than to aggregate industry news, links and stories along with commentary. Not setting business goals for a blog does has some advantages, like no accountability. But it also has some cons such as a huge waste of productive time and an audience that is largely disparate and transient.

With the explosion of SEO news blogs in 2004 and 2005, we started to move towards more original content through resource articles, blogging conferences and doing interviews. What has helped the most in that time was to better define the specific business goals we’re trying to reach through this blog, better understand the target audience and to create an internal editorial guide that supports both.

Make no mistake, any blog is a work in progress and despite the huge impact Online Marketing Blog has had on our business goals (build thought leadership, contribute to search community, lead generation), we’re still fine tuning to make it a better resource. By setting specific goals for the blog, we have benchmarks and accountability measures in place to make it a productive use of time and resource for readers.

Mistake Number Two. Control.

Since blogging for us started as an experiment, we didn’t take it too seriously. As a result, we used a third party blog hosting platform with a sub domain url at blogspot.com.

Why would we do that? It was easy. It was free. There was a base of functionality that met our needs at the time.

Why shouldn’t you host your blog using a third party domain name? You have no control. If you want to change blogging platforms, there is no reasonable way to redirect traffic from the old blog to the new address.

When we moved from toprank.blogspot.com to using WordPress as our blog software, Google’s Blogger service did not (and still does not) support any kind of redirection for users or for search engine robots.

Porting all of the old blog posts to the new hosting and blogging platform also created the issue of duplicate content. With no way to redirect pages, deleting the old blog would present users with ugly and alienating “404 Not Found” error pages.

Any link equity built up with the old blog was not transferable to the new blog. We had to start from scratch.

Other cons of using some third party hosted blogging services include a lack of functionality compared to WordPress and Movable Type, which are installed on the server. Third party subdomains are also often perceived as less credible than a dedicated domain name or a blog address that is part of the company domain name.

Preferred url syntax for a SEO friendly blog is: www.mydomainname.com/blog

The next best choice would be: blog.mydomainname.com

With current hindsight, the last choice would be: www.blogdomainname.com.

The last choice is what we ended up with for our blog and it’s not a bad choice, but it’s not as productive as having your blog as part of your main company domain. It takes more effort to promote and you do not receive direct link benefit.

All is not lost though. You can certainly start from scratch as we did 2 years ago and make significant progress in even less time with proper goal setting, the right platform, content and promotion.

Mistake Number Three. Metrics.

Hand in hand with goals are metrics. We ran our blog for a full year before implementing any kind of web analytics software. Ouch! Another issue can be a focus on the wrong metrics. Many bloggers get obsessed with who’s linking in, who’s mentioning their name and what their Technorati ranking is. Oops, I guess we’ve fallen into that category even recently.

The important thing is not to obsess over metrics that do not support the purpose of the blog.

In the end, if the metrics that support your business goals for the blog are not in place, you’re blogging in the dark. Like web sites, different kinds of blogs need attention on different metrics. For example, Online Marketing Blog is currently focused on building thought leadership and generating interest in TopRank’s services. We do not take on any advertising. If we did, we would need to change the kinds of metrics focused on.

Some of the common metrics according to type of blog include:

• Advertising revenue blogs – Unique visitors, page views and subscribers.
• Lead generation blogs – Inquires, time on site, repeat visitors
• Blogs for SEO purposes – Keyword rankings, links, referring traffic
• Thought leadership blogs – Media pickups, links from prominent bloggers, subscribers, inclusion in “lists”

Obviously there are metrics important for any kind of blog such as RSS subscribers, unique visitors and page views, but focusing on measurement according to the goals of the blog can make a significant difference in the effectiveness in content creation and promotion.

You may be the kind of person that learns best from making your own mistakes, but if you’re not, I hope you can learn from ours. What blogging mistakes have you made and learned from?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | 3 Blog Mistakes You Can Avoid | http://www.toprankblog.com