How to Use It

You can manually select keywords that you think would be highly relevant and then try to work them into the content. And when it is not possible to fit in a whole phrase naturally, you can always try to sprinkle those keyword modifiers that make up the phrase into your post’s content. For instance, in the above post I worked in the words software, free, search, and generator into the content quite naturally in only a 4 sentence blog post.

“Bloggers often don’t take the time to do keyword research for each article they write – they just want to get their story out there. Now, bloggers have instant access to relevant keywords so they can easily produce optimized blog posts. That’s sure to bring them extra traffic.” Said Ken McGaffin, CMO at Wordtracker.

Free Keyword Research Guide

And with this tool Wordtracker offers a free companion keyword guide for bloggers from my buddy ChrisG worth checking out if you are new to blogging or SEO.

Comments

Blogs tend to perform better because of the abundance of content. Blogs empower users to create content in a way that is easy and fun. By doing so, users are creating content on a daily, or weekly, basis.

More content means more traffic and links. This is more for search engines to index, more for users to link to, and more to share with their friends and co-workers.

More visitors can then lead to more sales and conversions. The more eyeballs that are in front of your content, the better the opportunity to turn them into your customer.

The same could be done on a website, but that doesn’t happen. People view blogs as something different than a website. This is probably because most website were built back in the day when you pushed a page live and then had to add a link in the navigation and it was all very technical. With blogs, those technical items get removed as blogs automatically do all the work of updating navigation, categories, feeds, and even pinging the search engines of new content.

Search engines like content, and they like fresh content. Blogs make this easy by giving the users the tools to create content easily. This in turn makes search engines happy and bring more visitors to your site. So, in a way, blogs do perform better in search, but it’s because users are posting more often and interacting with them more than traditional websites.

What do you feel are advantages to having a blog as compared to a traditional website?

Comments

Comments aren’t usually high up on the list of monitoring and watching what’s being said online.

Yet they should be, as a recent post by David Henderson and the subsequent conversation in the comments section show.

I won’t go too much into the actual blog post or the comments, as they’re both recommended reads and will give you a far clearer view of who may be in the right or wrong. What the post does highlight is that a blog comment can go even further than a blog post at painting an individual or company in a less than flattering light.

The gist of the post and resulting conversation is that David Henderson suggests that WordPress is an excellent medium for hosting your own online newsroom. Countering this is Steve Momorella of TEKgroup International, a company that develops and maintains online newsrooms.

What could have been a good discussion about both the validity of having your own online newsroom and how good WordPress is at running such a tool instead develops into a messy claim/counter-claim regarding the post and follow-up comments.

David seems to take umbrage with a comment made by Steve about the usefulness of WordPress and calls it a lack of understanding on Steve’s part. Steve is unhappy about David’s “disrespect” and so points out an error on David’s website.

This then results in other commenters joining in and by the end of everything, there’s a veritable “he said, she said” feel to everything.

While it makes for hugely entertaining reading, it also shows how a simple blog comment can taint someone’s view. I read David Henderson regularly. I respect him immensely and find him to be a great source of information and knowledge (although his constant putting down of PR does jade, after a while).

I didn”t know Steve Momorella prior to his comments on David’s blog post, but I do know of him now. Because of that blog post and its comments, I felt both David and Steve came out a little less positive than they otherwise might have.

While Steve’s comments have merit, they did come across as slightly leaned toward promoting his company which could be classed as comment spam. Whether that was the intent or not is down to Steve’s interpretation.

For David’s side, I felt he was being a little defensive and it maybe encouraged Steve to counter more than he would have.

From an outsider’s point of view, it could be seen as Steve is a promotional spammer and David doesn’t like comments that disagree with him. I know this isn’t the case with David and I’m guessing it’s not the case for Steve.

But see how easy a conversation in blog comments can sway a point of view?

Are you always thinking slightly about what you say and how it’s said when you comment on a blog? Or do you feel that it’s not something to worry about too much and just say what you feel regardless? Can comment conversations get away from you?

The comments are yours (no ironic pun intended).

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The most common reasons I hear for not starting a blog involve a lack of time to write posts, and limited ideas to write about, but taking that extra time to get some useful content out there can do wonders for your search rankings among other things.

An established blog that is updated regularly gets spidered by Google often, and increases the chances of new search rankings considerably. I have seen multiple situations where regularly updated blogs wind up ranking #1 in Google for relevant phrases literally within a couple hours of posting. It usually takes a well established website and blog to make this happen, but there is big potential if you do things the right way.

While blogs work best if updated multiple times per week, even those with a new post every week or two have advantages. Blogs don’t have to be a major undertaking, spending only an hour or so a week on posting can have you seeing results in no time.

There are many advantages to adding a blog to your website. Here are a few.

Increased Rankings
By boosting your topical content, you increase the value and relevance of your site. The more new stuff you add, the more of an authority you make your site, and this helps to improve your overall search rankings. It can also help you obtain rankings for “long tailed search phrases”.

Long tailed search phrases are those that are less commonly searched, and usually exceed 3 or 4 words in length – they are also very targeted to your product or service. Blogs are great for getting rankings on long tailed search phrases. If you see a long tailed search phrase you want to rank for, use the phrase as the post title (if it makes sense to do so) and write a good, content rich post about it and your ranking potential for this phrase will rise.

By writing blog posts with your target phrases in mind, you can often help improve your overall rankings by increasing the relevance of the site to that search phrase. Consider also linking to other relevant pages within your site from the post.

Increased Traffic
Blogs are great for increasing traffic. Aside from the added traffic you may see from search ranking improvements, if your blog is interesting and topical, you will get some repeat visitors to your site as readers check back for new posts. If people really like your blog, they will spread the word, resulting in even more visitors. Just think, have you ever emailed or instant messaged a friend with a link to an article you have read? Don’t you want your link to be the one passed around?

Credibility
By blogging regularly about your industry you will help to establish yourself as an expert. Many of your potential customers will see your blog and notice that you know what you’re talking about and be more likely to utilize your services. By sharing your knowledge it can help to instill trust onto your visitors which can actually result in increased conversions. There are a lot of faceless, anonymous websites out there – an active blog can help people relate to you and trust you.

Links
A good, well written blog can result in free one way links to your site. Sometimes it is as simple as a fan adding your link to their blog roll, and other times it may be RSS working its magic. Try to squeeze in a link or two into your posts and direct them to other internal pages on your website. If anyone then republishes or syndicates your posts on their sites, you will also end up with a relevant back link. (If you would like some other ideas on link building be sure to check out Ways to Increase Link Density & Building Links with Directory Submissions)

A blog is not a magic bullet used to skyrocket your inbound link counts, but it can certainly help.

What Platform To Use
I am a firm believer in the power of WordPress and the seemingly unlimited plug-ins available to help you. That said, just about any blog platform will work. It is probably best to stick with the main stream providers as they tend to have more options available and better support forums in case you get stuck with customization issues. In the end however, any search friendly blog platform will ultimately do the trick.

Blog Post Ideas
If after reading this you are sitting there thinking, “What should I write about?” here are some ideas to help you get going:

* New product launches
* Press releases
* Industry relevant news
* How to’s related to your product or service
* Answers to reader comments
* Posts revolving around relevant long tailed phrases
* In depth product descriptions or tutorials
* Company history or interesting stories
* Reviews of related products, services or online tools

Blogs are relevant for pretty much all industries, and they don’t have to take a lot of your time. A little creativity can help you come up with ideas for posts, just try to think outside the proverbial box.

If you’ve been putting off the blogging idea for some time, consider getting started now. There is much to gain and very little to lose.

Comments

It’s no surprise that blogs are highly optimized for search engines, tend to be the weapon of choice for linkbait campaigns and are usually the chosen weapon when a single individual (or marketer) decides to take on an airline, supermarket chain, or budget airline.

Add to that the fact that affiliate marketers are also employing it’s flexible architecture to construct landing pages, opt-in forms, affiliate content sites, shopping/shopping comparison sites, coupon sites, customer loyalty sites (plus the occasional or maybe not so occasional affiliate cookie stuffing site) and you’d realize that it’s not just a diarying platform anymore.

In a tweet yesterday, Top Ranking Marketing CEO Lee Odden fired out this tweet “Even thought I’ve said contrary, content published with blog software is technically a blog, but without comments, it’s not social #blogchat”

I sent the reply:

“Does the underlying platform define a blog? Or does blogging refer to the style in which content is published online?”

To which Lee replied:

“I think it’s the style in which content is published. We create newsrooms with blog software but I wouldn’t call them “blogs””

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So while publishing content (however, you may define it) on Blogger/Blogspot or WordPress may have been considered “blogging” before, I see that blogging (along with affiliate marketing) is growing up, we have to dig below the surface, to perform a more detailed analysis to see if it’s defined as a blog.

I’d associate the first generation of blogs (from the 1990s) as more of the “online diary” phase of blogging.

Later, as the medium progressed, editorial, expert comment and analysis crept into the mix. We weren’t limited by the everyday “I had mac and cheese for lunch” blog content (that’s prevalent in the infant media Twitter).

And still later, corporates got into the blogging-Public Relations/undercover sponsored blog side of things.

So blogging’s all grown-up, but does it have anywhere to go?

While marketers, merchants and affiliates wearing all hats from white to black are generating traffic, collecting leads, converting leads into customers and generally transforming WordPress into a transaction platform, still blogging in my opinion, excels as a personal or corporate branding platform.

I’ll be invite a public relations specialist to come on the Friday Podcast soon and one of the key issues will be seeing how blogs and social media are employed in the areas of reputation management and crisis management.

I’d recently spoke on a panel at a recent conference, and one of the panelists, a crisis management expert, talked about dealing with the media during the recent hijacking of the US-crewed Maersk ship by Somali pirates. Having a communications plan in place, along with the right communication channels to distribute this information, in the age of instant cellphone messaging and Twitter, can make the difference between showing the pro-active response by an individual or a business entity, or it could be a major public relations disaster.

Comments

I say no. Not everyone agrees with me, and they might be smarter than me, but here’s my reasoning.

If you host your blog on your own site, that’s beneficial for your site’s search rankings, because all the links you get to your blog raise the perceived importance of your site. That was my thinking when I set up my blog on my Web site and I think it worked just fine.

But in retrospect, I think setting my blog up elsewhere would have worked just fine, also. If I had set up my blog on a separate Web site, even a free one like Blogger, I’d have attracted links to my blog, which would improve the blog’s perceived importance, and my blog would be linking to my Web site anyway, passing along value to my Web site. In addition, when someone searched for me, I’d have two sites coming up in the results instead of just one.

Which approach works better? Who knows? It might make no difference at all.

Which, unfortunately, leads us back to our original question. Where should you host your blog? I think you should look at non-search factors to make your decision.

If you are the kind of person who likes to tinker with the look and feel of your blog, and doesn’t mind getting your hands dirty installing software, grab WordPress or Movable Type and have at it. Go install the blogging software on your site and customize to your heart’s content.

But if you think you need to wash your hands after handling a tar file, you’re better off using something simple, regardless of where it’s hosted. If you are fine with picking between the available styles and haven’t ever changed the default wallpaper on your computer, don’t drive yourself nuts now. It will just set up an impediment that keeps you from blogging.

It’s more important that you start blogging and that you write stuff that people want to read. I think if you do that, then you’ll get attention and it will help you. Whether the attention comes straight to your Web site or takes a slight detour along the way isn’t that important. If you’re blog is good, it won’t matter where you host it.

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That’s cool. People have opinions and sometimes these opinions are strong, and the comment section is where these opinions are allowed to be expressed.

It’s one of the reasons that I have an open comment policy. Some people emailed me asking why I was allowing the comments to stay when a lot were personal and derogatory. Simple - I believe in free speech and the right to air grievances. Of course my post wasn’t going to be popular with everyone and the comments bore that out.

But, as I say, that’s people’s prerogative and I won’t stifle that. Where I will (and did) draw the line is when you attack my readers and others leaving comments. If you have a gripe with me, fine, take that out on me - I’m big enough and ugly enough to take the heat.

But the community that are sharing their views? If you attack them with vitriol and over-the-top abuse, I will delete your comment. I think that’s fair.

Speaking of community, that’s one thing that was a positive result of the post, no matter what “side” you were on.

Although it led to some pretty personal comments against me, the response from the Tumblr community in particular was actually pretty cool to see. These are the friends of one of the guys who came up with the whole Fake-Twitter idea.

When it became clear that “one of their own” was involved, they quickly got together and started posting humorous parodies of me on Tumblr, along with their comments on the post itself.

While I may not be a fan of the personal attack over reasoned argument, it can’t be denied that the community spirit that I believe in and encourage was present. For that, I congratulate them.

We may not always agree on everything; we may not always agree on most things. But one thing we can agree on is that community and support is the way forward - isn’t it?

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WordPress offers a number of easy import options for most major free or paid blogging platforms out there. This makes it easy to move away from other software to your own, hosted, WordPress blog.

WordPress currently offers the ability to import:

* Blogger
* Blogware
* DotClear
* GreyMatter
* LiveJournal
* Movable Type
* TypePad
* Textpattern
* WordPress
* OPML Files
* RSS Feeds

Each one of these options can be access by logging into your hosted WordPress blog and visiting the Tools -> Import section. From there, WordPress will give specific step-by-step instructions on what to do.

Additional blogging platforms can also be imported, but are not officially supported. This includes:

* b2
* b2evolution
* Blosxom
* Drupal
* e107 CMS
* Excel/CSV Spreadsheet
* Jogger.pl
* Live Space (MSN Space)
* Mambo
* Motime - Splinder
* Pivot
* Plone
* PostNuke
* Nucleus CMS
* Radio Userland
* Roller
* Typo
* web-log.nl
* Xanga
* Zoomblog
* [X]HTML

Information on how to import this content can be found at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content

When it comes to sites like MySpace or Facebook, importing the content can be trickier. You can try the RSS approach or see if the social network offers an export function, but you may end up having to copy and paste the content into your new site. Currently, social networks don’t make it easy to get out what you put in.

The down side to moving all your content to your own hosted blog is you’ll loose any inbound links, rankings in search engines, and any exposure those posts may have built up at the original location. However, in time, the benefits of owning, and controlling, your blog are much greater over time.

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Design - The blog design is the visitors first impression. Is it well designed or is there to much clutter? Is it a custom design or a basic template? The blog design is very important, much like how the way one dresses can impact how others perceive them even before talking to them.

Post Frequency - Is there one post a day, week or month? Maybe ten or more a day. It’s hard to say what is the best post frequency, but blog owners don’t want to flood readers with posts yet they don’t want to leave them hanging for weeks on end with nothing new. The best is to try and keep a blogging schedule. Set aside 2 hours one day (or a few days) a week to write a post. This can help keep a steady pace.

Post Length - Are the blog posts short and sweet or long and detailed?

If a blogger posts long and detailed posts quite often, it may be to much for some to consume. Remember, they probably read many other blogs too and can’t spend 10 minutes or more on one blog post. On the flip side, I have seen some blogs post long and details posts, but only about one a week which gives the user a week to find enough time to read and engage with the entire post.

If the posts are short and sweet, then you can get away with more in a shorter period of time. However, are the posts then quality enough to keep the readers interested?

The best best is to keep a mix of more frequent short and easy to consume posts with less frequent, maybe 1 a week, longer and more in-depth posts..

Post Quality - Do the posts convey a unique view point? Or do they just quote everything from another site with no original content of their own. No one wants to read a summary of what other blogs are posting, it just doesn’t convey authority. Quality of posts is usually determined by what the author brings to the conversation.

Comments - If you take a look at the blog posts on the site, are they getting comments? Comments are not always easy to get, but any blog that has unique and quality content should be able to get at least a few a week.

Advertising - It’s understandable that some blog owners need to monetize their site with ads, however there is a line between monetization and usability that some sites cross. Being continuously berated with flashing, obtrusive, and just plain annoying ads can destroy the best blog.

Granted, no one factor can determine the integrity of a blog alone. Some blogs may look horrible, or have to many ads, but then you can just read the feed. Some may not post often, but when they do, it’s great content. It’s really up to the reader to decide if a blog is worth reading or not.

What other indicators do you use when looking at a blog and trying to determine if it’s a good blog?

Comments

What Makes a Blog Post Perfect?
That’s really a good question to ask yourself. I have been thinking about writing this blog post (about the perfect blog post) for a while now. Probably at least a year. And, finally I think I figured it all out. It really does not have anything to do with the topic (although it can help at times, especially if you are breaking some news or something on your blog). The perfect blog post really has more to do with the formatting and how you write it. If you follow along with me, you can write the perfect blog post: one that will actually have a chance of “going viral” if that’s what you want. If you don’t care about “going viral” on a social network, then that’s just fine: your readers will end up sticking around for a longer period of time, and actually reading your blog posts rather than just reading the blog title and then moving on.

Okay, So How Do I Write the Perfect Blog Post?
It’s really pretty simple. There are “elements” that you really absolutely positively must include in every single blog post. And, I highly suggest that you write your blog post in a certain “order”. By following this order and including these elements, you don’t have to be a fabulous writer in order to write what I call “the perfect blog post”. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Do some research. Google is your friend. Decide on your blog post’s overall topic, what you are going to write about, and search for it. If it’s about a company (one of my favorite things to write about), then search for the company name. Go to their “about us” page. You may able to include some raw data about the company like how long they’ve been in business, what they do, who their management team is, and soforth. If you’re writing about an organization, you may want to do the same thing: you will need some overall information about them to include in the blog post.

2. Start Writing Just go ahead and start writing. In the first paragraph, you need to write something that draws the reader in: make them want to read more by asking them a question. Make a snotty remark about something. And whatever you do in that first paragraph, you absolutely positively must tell them what you are going tell them. In this blog post, I did just that: I told you that I am going to tell you how to write the perfect blog post.

3. Include a Photo or Graphic No matter what the blog post is about, you absolutely positively must include a photo or graphic “above the fold” (towards the top, so the reader doesn’t have to scroll down to see it). You have about 3 seconds (maybe less) to thrill them. If all they see is a bunch of text, then they will move on to another site. Don’t let that happen. Include a company logo, a funny photo, or even some sort of graph if you have to. You can even include a screen capture of a web page. If I can’t come up with a funny photo for the blog post then I usually resort to a screen capture (I use the screengrab Firefox add-on). I save it as a .jpg file and I usually use Shrink Pictures to reduce the width to about 350 width so it fits in my blog post. As you can see on this blog post, I’ve included plenty of “pretty pictures” for you to look at. It’s best to use more than one graphic in your blog post. I like to use at least two, or even more. After writing hundreds of blog post, I have found that not only do people like photos, the search engines may even reward you for having a graphic in your blog post.

4. Tell them. In number two, I mentioned that the first paragraph should include something important: you tell them what you’re going to tell them. Well, this is your opportunity to tell them what you’re going to tell them. In this blog post, this is where I have my list of things that you must include in the perfect blog post. It’s a list in this case. But, it could be other content. It could be an actual review of a product. It could be a few paragraphs of what a new website does. It could be a lot of things. But, most importantly, it should include the findings of the research that you did even before you wrote the blog post.

5. Include Outgoing Links. Don’t be a link hog. If you’re talking about something, if you’re telling your readers about a website that you like or even about a company or something else that you can link to, then link out to that site. It won’t hurt you or your ability to rank in the search engines. Your visitors will love you for it (they can go check out what you’re talking about), and I have found that it really helps if you link out to a “trusted source”. In this blog post I have a few outgoing links: one of them is Google. When in doubt, link out to the Wikipedia page that describes what you’re writing about. You could actually find the word “blog” somewhere in your blog post and link out to the Wikipedia page about “blogs”.

6. Wrap it All Up. Put the bow on your gift. Your blog post is a gift to the world, it’s something that you’re telling people about, it is something that will help them in their daily life. The perfect blog post is useful. The perfect blog post is something that includes information about something. When the reader reads it they will say to themselves, “Gee, I didn’t know that before.” At the end of your blog post, include a paragraph of information that tells them what you told them. Recap your blog post. Give them an overview of what you told them. Tell them where to go after they read the blog post. Give them a link to a website if that’s appropriate.

I know that there’s probably a lot more elements that you could include in your quest for the “perfect blog post”. And, depending on who you ask, you will probably get a lot of different responses. In this case, though, I told you about my version of the perfect blog post in a way that’s not too specific: I believe that it doesn’t matter what topic you write about: just make sure that you tell them what you’re going to write about, tell them, and then tell them what you wrote about. And, if at all possible, include a few photos or graphics (or embed a video) into the post “above the fold”.

Comments

About the author:
Bill Hartzer manages the Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing team at Vizion Interactive, a leading search engine marketing, social media marketing, and web design firm based in the Dallas, Texas area. Hartzer recently joined Vizion Interactive, where his vast experience in the both search engine marketing and social media marketing bolster’s Vizion Interactive’s already robust search engine marketing and social media marketing offerings.