blogging
As a blogger myself I know the importance of creating an online identity. I started snooping around to see what has been written on blogging and how much people really know about it. It is strange to me that people still define a blog as an online journal or diary, because this definition for me is a bit out dated. Read Further
It is so vital to build momentum through your blog.
So, if you need to up the ante on content for your blog, here are some points to remember:
We like this: Plinky, a new service that helps you create inspired content on the web (via ReadWriteWeb)
Like it or not. You’re a writer. You’re creating content on a daily basis, updating your Facebook status, commenting on blogs, sending tweets. Social networking requires that level of communication. But as a writer, you’re also a potential victim for writer’s block, a condition that plagues even the most prolific authors. Read Further
What a day, what a day… first we were on a super high after President Obama’s inauguration and THEN, World Wide Creative’s fearless leader and web marketing mastermind, Mike Perk, was found!!
After an almost 5 month pledge of silence, Mike shocked the entire WWC team (and apparently Obama himself!) by writing and publishing his first blog post since September 12, 2008 – albeit on our client’s blog www.smallcapital.co.za… check it out… Read Further
I normally work on the optimisation of websites, so I’ve just been applying the same principles to our blog. Blogs are basically websites, with each new post becoming a new page on that site. We looked at the keywords and optimised the site, we are continually updating with fresh content – things we know the search engines like. Links are also vital, the more natural the better, but we do need to give it a little push and get our name out there.
I’ve been investigating possible ways to do this and as well as the same we would use for normal sites (such as Google site maps) we can use special directories. Okay lets start with Yahoo:
1) Set up a free Yahoo account by going to www.yahoo.com. It will ask you to set up your home page. Which will then force you to set up an account.
2) Go to your new home page. At the top of the page you’ll see a link that says "Add Open Content from around the Web by URL".
You will then need to get your URL for your RSS feed in your blog application (i.e. blogger.com or typepad.com). in Blogger.com it is in the settings, in typepad go to your blog and go to the "subscibbe to this blogs feed" and right click. Copy the link and place this where Yahoo asks you to add a link.
Then click "add to My" button in top right.
We’ll have a crack at MSN tomorrow.
- Mike
Now we know the phrase we want to get the blog found for we can ensure that whenever we are writing our Blogs we include the phrase profitable websites somewhere in each of our blog posts (when possible).
Don’t sacrifice your key message just to get your keyword into your blog, but when an opportunity arises take it.
The search engines should then pick that up and due to the frequency level within this blog post being high for that phrase, it rates us more highly for it. Over time if included in enough of our posts the ranking will improve.
Something to remember when optimising anything for search engines is that Google (for example) will rate the words in bold and italics higher than normal text. Larger text is more important than smaller text and the title of the page is important. And if you can get your keyphrase as a link thats even better. And if you link back to another one of your sites that will also benefit that site.
So in this post for example we have managed to get our phrase "profitable websites" in there three time. Once in bold, once in italics and once in the title.
If one of the objectives of your blog is to bring in new traffic (and our is), one possible way of getting that traffic there is via the search engines.
We optimise quite a few sites for particular search engines, but it not something we have promoted enough for blogs. The great thing about blogs is they are usually relevant and up to date (which the search engines like), which can’t always be said of websites.
So how do we go about optimising a blog? The first thing is deciding which keywords you want to optimise your blog for. In our industry we could go for:
web sites
web design
web marketing
marketing online, etc, etc. The possibilities are endless.
But we need to give ourselves a bit of a chance of getting to the top. The best way to do this is with a keyword analysis (something I’m sure we’ll have as its own heavy chef topic in the months to come). It simple really:
"Find the words people are search for that few websites are competing for."
As a stats geek I love this sort of research, but others will hate. There are however tools out their to help you, such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery and a new piece of software we are using at the moment for our PPC keyword analysis called Keyword Elite. We will cover these in more depth another time. For the time being if you are doing this analysis fo the first time I would recommend Wordtracker as the tool to use, because you can purchase it for a period of time and as such can use it for a day for as little as 5.
We brainstormed all the possible words people could use to find our site – always bearing in mind the focus of our business and blog. We expanded these with Wordtracker and the tested them to se if any gaps existed in the market that we could exploit. We are also working on Sophia from The Cape Table Club who is brainstorming her possible keywords at the moment. Which we will then show her how to test for possible effectiveness.
Our choosen keyphrase from the results for World Wide Creative and The Heavy Chef Blog was:
"Profitable Websites"
And our initial target market is South Africa.
- Mike
ideate
…IF the authors posting on www.ideate.co.za (about Small Business in SA) DIDN’T participate in the conversations taking place on each of their posts…
Fortunately, the “mild-mannered alter-egos” behind Ideate, Fred (The Heaviest Chef of them all!!), Andrew and Shane, as well as some of their other guest contributors, ARE participating – and this, to me, is the primary reason behind Ideate’s success.
Don’t believe me? Case in point, I randomly went throught 10 posts and this was the level of participation from them… Read Further