Helpful Tips for Corporate Blogging

Blogs are massive resources of information from both and outside companies. Businessmen survive the world of blogging because they know how and where to dig information while protecting their own secrets. Although blogging can be risky world for businesses, there are several helpful tips that can help bring success to corporate blogging.

The Important of Training:

It is important to make sure the members of the communications team. In the past, this team was composed of a small group. However, with the advent of blogging, everyone who blogs at the company is spreading a specific message about the company. People who handle the blogging for the company must be trained to avoid any spill of unnecessary information.

If by accident, important information regarding the company has been disclosed, this can put the company under the watchful eyes of the regulators. More so, inappropriate leaks can provide competitors with leverage and may lead to embarrassing revelations about the inner workings of the company and its staff.

Although the usual action to be taken is to restrict employees from blogging, this can be a shortsighted decision. Bloggers from within the company can easily relate and make contact with potential clients and even enhance the brand of the company.

The Fake Blogs:

Several, if not all, companies are eager to establish one-on-one links with their consumers, though they are
often hesitant to venture in the world of blogging. As a result, they set up fake blogs. Fake blogs are those that are created by marketing departments of the company in order to promote a product, brand or service using a fake name or character.

These kinds of blogs are risky since several bloggers who are passionate about what they do view them as an insult to the blogging community and no one can deny the fact that these blogs are very visible to the public.

Although there are no rules prohibiting a company from making pseudo-blogs, the subject of creating one is always welcome. Always keep in mind that you can choose to create fake blogs but remember all the risks
involved.

Blog Tracking:

Tracking blogs is one of the easiest and most important tips to remember. Firstly, the company can look around online and search for the most influential blogger who writes about their products or services. Remember to read the blogger’s updates everyday and perform an automated tracking of discussions.

Tracking blogs is important because even those postings from small-time bloggers can be selected by search engines, strengthened by a well-known blogger and ultimately hit the mainstream.

The Public Relations:

Blogs have the ability to break down barriers between the company and its customers. It is important for businesses to take that into consideration and adjust. There are several companies that start blog in order to attain customer loyalty and address the customers’ concerns and comments. Relating to the customers is a vital factor in the survival of a business. Knowing what the customers think about the products or services can help enhance the company’s services.

The Company’s Secrets:

Take into consideration one secret or secrets that you have kept at your company. Be it a list of projects for the following year or information about scandalous activities, there are several things that you must learn no to leak to your competitors.

In blogging, there is a certainty that you must rethink about something that you are trying to avoid, for that fact that other companies are increasingly sharing information to win new partners and generate new ideas. Although this does not mean that they are not keeping any secrets from you or that you must not keep any from them, it is important to reevaluate whether you can gain more out of sharing details than keep them to yourself.

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101 Blogging Tips I’ve Learned in 2008

1. Choose WordPress
2. If you use blogspot, get your own domain
3. Choose the right hosting provider
4. If possible, have keywords on your domain
5. Use dashes for long domain name
6. Opt for .com or .net and avoid the rest
7. Have the post-install checklist
8. Optimize your permalink
9. Plugins does wonder to your blog
10. Choose the right plugins
11. Too many plug-ins will slow down your blog
12. Pick your niche carefully and stick with it
13. Be passionate about what you write
14. Aim to be an expert in your niche
15. Don’t lose your credibility by faking it
16. Be accountable to what you say write
17. Posting frequency is over-rated
18. Read more than you write. Organize your RSS subscription
19. Avoid chunk of long article. Break it down into paragraph
20. Use bold headings
21. Use list
22. Write long article to get traffic
23. Picture speaks a thousand words. Use images
24. Start and end with questions whenever possible
25. Proofread twice before you publish
26. Focus on keywords in post title
27. Write for both readers and search engines
28. Your readers come first, everything else second
29. Learn the importance of keyword research
30. Being #1 on Google doesn’t necessarily brings in the traffic
31. Keywords must be searchable. Check its average search volume.
32. Don’t be afraid to link out
33. To get attention, link out to inner pages and not homepage
34. Explain What is RSS? Not everyone is tech-savvy
35. Use feedburner
36. Offer email subscription
37. Don’t display your subscribership too early
38. The first 100 is the hardest. The next 100 is easier to achieve
39. Back up your blog
40. Speed up your blog
41. Optimize your blog
42. Design matters, first impression counts
43. Get a premium theme
44. If budget isn’t an issue, get a custom theme
45. Unclutter your sidebar
46. Have an “About Me” page. It makes it more personal
47. Don’t hide behind your blog
48. Mascot is the trend but real picture improves your credibility
49. Always have a “Contact Me” page
50. Dofollow your blog to get your community off the ground
51. Promote your blog via commenting
52. Leave relevant comments. One-line comments are frowned upon
53. Get yourself a gravatar and see #48
54. Link to inner pages when commenting
55. Use Fast Blog Finder
56. Be the first to comment
57. Avoid A-list blogs when you are new as
58. No one cares about your opinion unless you are John Chow
59. Moderate your comments. Use Akismet.
60. Always reply to comments
61. Don’t underestimate the use of keywords on your comment
62. Visit your commenters’ sites. Reciprocal commenting is the key
63. Activate top commentator plugin
64. Enable “Subscribe to Comment“
65. Join my PageRank list
66. Learn the art of pin-point commenting
67. Reward your top active commenters
68. Don’t monetize too early
69. Adsense isn’t going to make you rich overnight
70. Adsense works best with organic traffic
71. Cost-Per-Click (CPC) is higher on niche sites
72. Subscribers don’t click ads
73. Learn the art of affiliate marketing
74. Write product review
75. Check your stats
76. Study your popular pages and
77. Monetize those pages
78. Optimize your old articles for search traffic
79. Learn basic SEO
80. Make use of SEO tools
81. Duplicate content is a myth
82. Google sandbox is real
83. Focus on one-way link building
84. Have keywords on footer
85. Write a guest post and invite guest posters
86. Promote your blog site with article marketing
87. Learn the power of outsourcing
88. Use signature links on “dofollow” forums
89. Join Twitter and use it creatively.
90. Digg is useless
91. Use Squidoo and promote with Knol
92. Join Technorati and claim your blog
93. Make into 45n5 Top 100 list
94. Be patient. There isn’t any shortcut to blogging success.
95. Have perseverance. Your passion is your passport to success.
96. Find out what people want and help them get it.
97. For blogging tips, read ProBlogger
98. For copywriting tips, read CopyBlogger
99. For personal development tips, read Steve Pavlina
100. The ‘gurus’ are not always right
101. Create a 101 list

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Tips for SEO on Your Blog

Blogs Get Scraped
You may have noticed that on each blog entry I do, I have a signature at the bottom that includes links to my website and details about me. I do this for a reason. There are robots out there in the world that will take and "scrape" your blog for articles relevant to what the site is that they are searching for content for. They will then (without permission) post your blog on their site so as to drive traffic to their site.

Google Alerts
Now, I have a Google Alerts that keeps track of when my name, my company name, or the name of my book comes up on the web. So when I get scraped (and it happens often), I can find out where it went. And, if they didn't maintain my links intact, then I can comment on the post and ask that they reinstate the links.

Let Them Have the Post
Notice I DIDN'T say that I could ask them to remove the posting. Because I don't want them to. Sure, they stole my content. But they could have had it for the asking if they kept the links in place. I am perfectly happy to have my stuff show up everywhere - with my links in place. Why? Two reasons.

Driving Traffic Directly From Scraping Site
Perhaps someone will find my site as a result of reading the article on their site. After all, they're scraping all sorts of relevant content - they should reach some of my target market too.

Driving Up Your SEO
And, more importantly, each incoming link to my site increases my SEO. A link about real estate training to my real estate training web page. A link about real estate products to my real estate product page. A link for real estate coaching to my real estate coaching page. A link about internet training, to my Web 2.0 Training for Realtors (sign up before the end of December and save $100.) web page. How great is that? (And did you notice the little trick I just did with putting all of those links in? Now when this post gets scraped, my SEO will go up even more.)

While We're On The Subject
Don't forget to put a copyright notice in the footer of your pages to protect you. And, if you have one already, remember that you need to change it to 2009 in a few days. We want to be accurate.

Conversion Tools
Remember also that your blog is advertising. Use it to convert lurkers into leads. Add a conversion tool like the one I have below. It references a free training program I have available online. All you have to do is tell me who you are and give me a valid email address. If you have a white paper or recorded class you can trade to buyers or sellers in exchange for their email address, then you're styling too.

Include a Share, Digg, or Delicious Button
You want people to be able to tell others about the cool things they read on your blog. Make it easy for them to do so using a simple button. Getting your posts included in these directories also does wonders for your SEO.

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5 reasons people don’t read your blog

The first step to increasing your web presence is understanding why no one is currently reading your blog. Here are 5 reasons your blog is dead.

1. It Isn’t Optimized- If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times—the search engines love fresh content. That’s why it’s so important that you optimize your blog posts. By including relevant keywords in your titles and content, you increase your chances of ranking well in the search engines. High organic search rankings will earn you a steady flow of traffic.

2. You Aren’t Marketing It- A blog is like any other property—you have to market it if you want people to see it. Beyond optimizing your posts, you need to push your content on the social media sites. While you might say “But I already submit all my posts to Digg and other sites.” Social media marketing is about more thank clicking submit. It takes time and a commitment to the community to learn how to properly market content through social media.

3. Your Titles are Boring- The internet is overflowing with blogs. Recent estimates put the total number of blogs well in excess of 100 million. With so many posts pulling at online users’ attention, it’s crucial that you give people a reason to click on your blog. How can you do this? The best way is by creating compelling titles that force people to click. Ask yourself, “if I saw this title, would I click on it?” If not, you need to change it.

4. You Don’t Offer Anything New- What do you offer users that they can’t find anywhere else? If you’re just another “me too” blogger, you don’t give readers an incentive to follow your blog. It’s the same old content that’s been done a thousand times before. Offer something new. Just give your true pinion, and that will help separate you from the pack.

5. The Content Isn’t Scannable- There’s nothing wrong with having a lot to say. Just make sure you don’t present your content in a format that scares readers away. Long blocks of text with no whitespace will cause visitors to click “back” immediately. Break it up into short passages with bold headings so that it’s easier to scan.

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How can CMS help in search engine optimization

If you have a sincere desire of your website showing up prominently in various search engines such as Google, CMS can really help you. However, you need to know that all CMSs are not created equally. It is important to know about the features prior to looking for any help with SEO.

Here are some ways you can achieve better search engine optimization with CMS:

Planning:
The first step is to plan your SEO strategy in an effective way. Remember that no CMS will ever replace the requirement for you to have a well defined SEO.

Web address:
It is extremely important to look to the web address of every page. All should contain URLs that are human reliable. Also include plug-ins or additional modules to help make the URLs user friendly. All your URLs should be permanent, based at your organization and individually customizable.

Templates:
Make sure that all your templates use clan and standard code. Try to verify that the code follows established standards in order to facilitate search engines to read it.

Meta tag customization:
It is important to look for good content management features that will facilitate all your business user to create tags separately for each page.

Site maps:
When it comes to site maps, make sure that you opt for automatically created site maps instead of the traditional ones.

Robot control:
Remember that search engine spiders are in consistent search for any kind of instructions that you might have for them in a text files. This text file is known as ‘robots.txt’. The instructions that you provide can prove to be really helpful in indicating search engines on what not to index.

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Search engine optimization SEO leads to blogging and social media marketing

Search engine optimization, blogging and social media marketing are all connected to each other. Confused? Here is an explanation on this:

Blogging supports SEO efforts:
Blogging is known to be the fastest way to produce a lot of keyword density and optimized pages on your website and that too all around your keywords. Remember that people are more interested in linking to a blog post as compared to your ‘services page’. Links are the most important part of getting a favorable rank on search engine.

Social media marketing or SMM supports all SEO efforts:
This is true in the case of off page SEO or link building. There are several websites on social bookmarking such as Digg, Reddit, Mixx and many more. There are also many blog communities such as MyBlogLog and are often classified as ‘social media’. These are really helpful in building links for you directly.

Social media marketing supports blogging:
This is done via driving traffic to the blog. If you answer questions on social media regularly and leave a link that’s relevant to blog posts, you will generate some leads each month.

Blogging supports social media marketing:
Most blogs have a significant amount of email subscribers and RSS.

Search engine optimization supports social media marketing:
There is a good proportion of traffic created from search engines via HubSpot or other social media marketing websites.

Search engine optimization is the foundation:
The Search engine optimization is the foundation of all marketing sources online such as blogging and social media marketing.

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6 Reasons Why A Blog Will Help Your SEO

1. Blogs are all about content. Search engines love content. They don't love Flash, and they're still struggling with photos and video, but they absolutely get content.

2. Blogs have text-based navigation. Search engines have an easier time with text based (vs. image based) navigation because it's more transparent. Search engines for a while now have told us that they want sites to serve up the same information/experience to a search engine bot as to a person.

3. Blogs offer lots of links. If search engines feast on words, they travel on links. Blogs are often a good place to find new content on the Web.

4. People are more likely to link to business blogs than business Web sites. At least, this has been my experience, and anecdotally what I've seen out there. I believe this is because of the interactive nature of blogs, and they're traditionally more about communication than selling. And since getting incoming links is half the battle of search engine optimization, this is a key point.

5. Blogs make it easier to create more pages. Search engines don't rank Web sites, they rank Web pages. In other words, every Web page is an opportunity to rank well at the search engines. Every time you put up a new post, you have another opportunity to be found at Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine. You don't need to worry about how this is going to fit in your current Web site navigation, you can just assign it to one or more categories and be done with it.

6. Blogs put you in control. This doesn't directly affect your search engine optimization, but with a blog you can publish when you feel like it. You don't have to worry about how much your Web developer's going to charge you for an update, or when he's going to get to it. That makes it easier for you to target new keywords and go after the long tail of search that can bring ready-to-buy, qualified leads to your site.


If you are interested in better rankings but don't yet have a blog, the good news is there's a great opportunity for you to increase your search engine visibility.

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SEO Advantages of Blogs

The SEO advantages of doing this are a slightly different matter, a bit more obscure and harder for many people to grasp. When all is said and done, SEO is all about keywords. Search Engine Optimization amounts to the systematic and disciplined use of specific keywords in the most advantageous places within your web content.

In other words, the point of SEO is to give the search engines a clear idea of what each web page, article, video, press release, etc. is about. This will help you move up in the high stakes game of search engine results, make you visible to the right people, and drive traffic to your site.

Creating a blog increases your odds in the search engine traffic game. There are a number of reasons…

1. Because your blog is being updated on a regular basis the search engines will visit more often, and if your content is deemed worthy of attention, your posts will start appearing in search engine results very quickly.

2. If you are using your blog effectively you will be creating posts once a day, or every few days, and you will be be discussing a series of issues or providing information about a fairly narrow subject area -in my case, for example, about “local business marketing”. The cumulative effect of regularly creating content focusing on a narrow, well-defined area is to gradually establish your blog as a worthwhile source of information on your chosen topic - what Google calls an “authority”. The more authoritative your site or blog becomes, the better it will do in search engine results.

3. The fact that you are creating new pages (for the search engines each post is considered a “page”) means that you can cover a wider range of keywords. If you watch the sources of your search traffic you will notice that people find you by searching for a very large number of keyword phrases, variations and combinations. Creating posts on a regular basis lets you “optimize” each of them for different keywords. Hopefully they will all be related to your primary area, but they will also let you expand your focus somewhat.

For example, a website about SEO may contain several pages discussing the merits of search engine optimization, and the specific methods you employ to enhance a client’s search engine rankings. SEO theory suggests each of those pages should focus on a fairly narrow set of keywords.

But if you have a blog about SEO you can create a virtually unlimited range of pages about different aspects of SEO:

Onpage SEO
SEO and traffic
Offpage SEO
SEO and links
SEO and Wordpress
SEO and Blogs
Article marketing SEO
SEO and video

And unlike with normal website pages you can be very specific in your focus:

The best SEO Wordpress plugins
Can Search Engine Optimization Turn Your Business Around
SEO and Corporate Blogging
etc., etc.

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How to build traffic to your blog

With the growing interest in blogging as a means of online promotion and branding, a lot of marketers are starting blogs to promote their opinions, products, books and services.

But a blog is like a website. "Write and they will come" isn't exactly a magic formula to bring in traffic by the boatload.

If you need to promote your website in order to build traffic to it, you need to promote your blog as well.

Here are some ways you can become a well-read and influential blogger.
1. Write Posts That People Will Want To Read
2. Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines
3. Submit Your Blog and RSS Feed To Directories
4. Ping The Blog Services
5. Build Links To Your Blog
6. Edit Your Blog Posts Into Articles
7. Create Buzz About Your Blog
8. Capture Subscribers By Email

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1. Write Posts That People Will Want To Read

This should be common sense, but many marketers tend to forget that their readers are real people and that you need to use the principles of online copywriting to make your headlines and copy interesting to your readers.

If you write posts that people enjoy reading, they will reward you by returning to your blog regularly.

Make your posts conversational, pithy and topical. Keep them short and stick to one topic per post.

Write often and regularly so that both readers and search engines visit your blog more often.

2. Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines

Blog-SEOI cover this topic in detail in my article on "Search Engine Optimization For Blogs" Blog SEO

But here are the most important rules to follow to get your posts listed for keywords of your choice.

* Make sure your blog URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for

* Use your primary keywords in the title of your post

* Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post

* Use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts

3. Submit Your Blog and RSS Feed To Directories

If you publish a blog you should submit your blog and RSS feed to big directories like Yahoo and Dmoz, as well as the numerous blog directories and search engines.

Here is the best list I've found of places to submit your feed or blog, compiled by Luigi Canali De Rossi, who writes under the pseudonym Robin Good.

RSS SpecificationsBest Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites Masternewmedia.org Top55

Another list of sites to submit your Blog. Rss-specifications.com - RSS Submission

4. Ping The Blog Services

There are a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you've updated your blog so they can come check you out.

Bookmark the Ping-O-Matic ping results page so you can visit it and quickly ping a number of services with a single click.

Pingomatic.com

5. Build Links To Your Blog

I recommend the methods here as the best ways to get links pointing to your blog

* Link to your blog from each page on your main website

* Trackback to other blogs in your posts

* Post legitimate comments on other blogs with related topics

* Offer to exchange links with other similarly themed blogs and websites

6. Edit Your Blog Posts Into Articles

One of the best methods for promoting your website is to write articles and submit them to article directories.

The suggestion for extending this to edit your blog posts into articles and submit them to directories came from the coach at "Explode Blog Traffic" who also has other noteworthy suggestions at his blog here. How To Explode Blog Traffic.

You'll find an extensive list of article directories here Ebizwhiz-publishing.com - Submit Articles

7. Create Buzz About Your Blog

Creating a buzz about your blog posts and topic in the local and online media will give your marketing a viral component.

* Create a controversy around your blog or it's topic.

* Distribute bumper stickers or other merchandise with your blog's URL and tagline.

* Write a press release about something newsworthy and tie it in with your blog topic.

8. Capture Subscribers By Email

It may seem strange for a blogger to send out updates by email, but email is still the #1 choice of most people who want to receive news and information.

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Bloggers Resources For Building a Useful Blog

These days, it is fairly easy to set up a simple blog for personal use or even for a small business. There are an ever increasing number of tools and software programs available nowadays to help bloggers design their blogs and get them online in record time. In fact, most of these programs don't even require a budding blogger to learn coding or programming in order to create a simple, yet attractive new blog.

The fact of the matter is that there isn't even very much technical knowledge, skill or experience required these days to become a blogger and have your own successful money making blog once you have an internet marketing strategy in place. Most people with average skills can put together a simple 5 page blog in just a few hours of tinkering with a brand new piece of blog development software.

In today's world, getting a brand new site up and running is not really a mystery. But, what has many bloggers stumped and stuck is finding the best way to let people know that their new blog is now online and ready for visitors. Until internet surfers know about a new site, there frankly won't be any visitors and any work put into the site will go unnoticed.

For people who are building a personal blog and who will send out an email to all their friends and family to view their new blog, this is probably not even a problem and they perhaps might even prefer that strangers don't find it. But, the lack of blog traffic can be terribly vexing for bloggers who have worked hard, even if it was only a few hours, to put up a new site with some good web content in order to help promote their business or to try to start selling something online.

All too often, someone with plans to make money blogging will complete their new blog and then sit back and check their stats every half hour, only to see that the only one visiting the site is the blogger himself, or the search engine spiders. However, if there is some activity from those spiders from the search engines, then at least there is some hope.

One thing every blogger must learn to do is to utilize proper search engine optimization, or SEO techniques. This is the part that can be much more complex and time consuming to learn than the technical aspects of building a webpage and taking care of the blog hosting. SEO entails a number of things, in order to attract the attention of those search engine spiders and get them to index the site with a high ranking.

There are a couple of blogs offering keyword tools and great advice about making money blogging. A few of of these resources go into great detail about how to do proper search engine optimization. With a little time, even a newbie can take the info they can find about SEO and apply it to their site and eventually they will start to see their site climb the Google results for certain keywords and phrases.

Having a clear idea of what the most important keywords are for a new blog is one of the most important things that bloggers must know because it is fundamental to performing good search engine optimization. A blogger has to identify and then target the main keywords that the people who comprise their target market will be using to do their searches. Once they know the primary keywords, they can tailor their content and other SEO elements around those terms, and then they will begin to see an improvement in their blog statistics and traffic from the search engines.

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5 Tips To Grow Search Engine Traffic To Your Blog

1. Know your keywords

Keywords are the building blocks of a blog and web site. Naturally, you should target just one keyword per blog post. Avoid creating content just for the sake of having the keyword on your blog. You should provide valuable content and impress the visitors. Only then will they consider subscribing to your content feed.

You should be thinking about what the visitors do on your site. Optimizing the result from the same amount of traffic is as important, if not more.

2. Optimize your blog design

You will be surprised that many bloggers claim their blog themes or templates as search engine friendly because the themes were advertised as such. Spend some time to check the template to make sure it has the right title tag, order of content, heading tags and so on.

Your time will be well spent. After all, it is most likely a one-time task. It may make a difference between ranking for long tail keywords and not getting found at all.

3. Restructure your site

Theming with silos is a great way to structure and divide your blog content into subtopics. Many SEO experts represent siloing as simple tiered content. They are quite similar in a few points but nevertheless you should thinking about making your content topics obvious to search engines.

Tiered content without proper linking doesn’t help build topic on your site. For instance, you should only link to a silo (or parent) instead of children cross another silo. Good practice avoids diluting the theme of your site or blog.

That can help rankings because once search engines think your blog is related to certain subtopic, you are going to get more long tail keywords for that subtopic.

4. Gain inbound links

There is more than one way to do it, from article marketing to link baiting, blog commenting, forum marketing and so on. When you are just starting out, every little tactic matters to grow your traffic level to a few hundreds a day.

Your aim is to reach more center of influence. Once you are at this level, every new post will result in a few more backlinks to your blog.

5. Patience

As the age of your domain increases, your blog will also be considered more valuable, especially if you keep it active throughout the time.

Search engine optimization doesn’t produce flood of traffic immediately but it is often worth the effort. Giving up too early in the process is one of the biggest reasons why people fail at this.

Another thing to keep in mind is that traffic from organic search grows gradually. As you target more keywords within your content and gain more authority through backlinks, you will only grow your traffic.

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SEO Basics for Business Bloggers

SEO, or search engine optimization, is an effective online marketing strategy that increases your search traffic by improving the search rankings of your site’s pages. By know, most webmasters realize that getting multiple top 10 rankings on Google is a very good thing.

There are technical aspects to SEO that are complicated, but luckily, the fundamental SEO principles of SEO are not rocket science.
To learn SEO, you should first understand the most weighty factors that search engines use to rank pages.

These following four elements make up a big chunk of the search engine algorithm. If you can nail these elements, you’ll be ahead of most bloggers and webmasters.

1. Title tag
Search engines look at the keywords in the title tag. If you have relevant keywords in the title tag, you’ll automatically rank better for those keywords.

2. Quality links from other sites
Search engines also look to see if quality sites are linking to your site. If you get a lot of links from quality sites, then you’ll see an increase in search traffic.

3. Anchor text
Anchor text are the words contained in a link. For example, I can link to my home page with the anchor text business blogs to rank better for that search term. However, it’s much more effective to get anchor text on links from other sites.

4. Body text
Finally, we have body text. With people using keywords to search, it makes sense that search engines would check out the text on a page.

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More SEO Tips for Bloggers

Meta tags won’t help your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because they don’t have an impact on your SEO ranking. However, meta descriptions can help because people may want to search/link/read more if the description is interesting.

The “title” portion of the img src tag is only useful to you. It allows you to give your images more description so you know what you’ve shown in your image. It is not at all used in SEO. On the other hand, the “alt” portion of the img src tag offers some help with SEO, but only in Google Images.

It is possible to over-optimize your blog or web site for SEO. If, for instance, you’re writing a post about cell phones, you may choose to use several variations of cell phone: cell phone, cellphone, mobile phone, Verizon, iPhone, etc. This can overwhelm your post because you’re using too many keywords in the hopes of stronger SEO. Your readers are turned off and not reading. Instead, focus on what is irresistable. What is the most interesting part of your post? What will make the readers more interested?

What not to do for SEO: Don’t micro-focus your posts. You’ll most likely end up with short, limited posts that read more like an advertisement. In turn, these types of posts rarely offer value.

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Performance Related SEO In An Economic Downturn

Like a number of SEO companies we have occasionally offered performance related services in the past. These normally work by us taking a percentage of the increase in revenue we drive via organic search.

The problem with these agreements is when it comes to setting benchmark figures to measure our performance against. When the economy is in freefall and retailers in most industries are issuing profit warnings even the best SEO companies might struggle to achieve positive growth over the next 24 months.

Some industries such as insurance and payday loans are recession proof but in retail it wouldn’t be a surprise to see online revenues falling by 20-40%. Any SEO company on a performance related contract benchmarked against last years turnover is going to really struggle!

Of course SEO is a fantastic way to increase profitability during these uncertain times. If you can maintain turnover while your competitors are losing then you gain valuable market share. Once the economy recovers you have a huge advantage by being at the top of Google for all your keywords.

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SEO your individual blog posts

Optimizing individual blog posts for your human readers as well as the search engines is as important as optimizing your entire blog. In fact it is much more beneficial, and easier to search engine optimize individual blog posts rather than focusing on the entire blog, and this reasserts the importance of sticking to the quintessential theme of your blog.

Many blogs become famous not for their overall content but for the amount of attention some of their posts get from all over the Internet. That’s why more emphasis is given to the quality of individual posts because any post can turn you into a blogging superstar. I am not an SEO expert but my experience tells me that if you stick to the following guidelines you can search engine optimize your individual blog posts. Please keep in mind that you rankings depend on lots of other factors.
Make your title straightforward, compelling, and use your primary keywords in the title

Some SEO and blogging experts insist that your blog post title is the most important component of your blog post but I slightly disagree because I think the most important component of your blog post is the content of your blog post. Have a great title and mediocre content and in just a few moments your title is declared bogus.

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