The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Every now and then I read an article that claims that keywords are obsolete and that search engines now rely entirely on semantic language indexing. The truth is, that’s all wrong. Let’s deal with a few facts.

• Semantic language indexing is not new. Google has been doing it for years. They’ve gotten better at it, of course, and other search engines have started to incorporate it as well. But none of them have abandoned keywords.
• Type a search query into any search engine and see what comes up. Your first results will almost all incorporate the exact keyword phrase that you typed into the search engine’s search box. That’s evidence itself that keywords are still important.
• Keyword densities, the process of counting keywords and ensuring that you have the right mix of keywords in your content compared to the number of overall words, are not important. In fact, for about five or six years now, they haven’t been. This fact could be the reason for the myth that keywords themselves are not important.
• How many keywords you have in your content is not important. Where those keywords are located within the content is much more important.
• Most search engines these days rely on both keywords and semantic language indexing to some degree.

The advent of semantic language indexing has not made keywords obsolete. It does mean that keywords for the sake of keywords are not important. It makes keyword stuffing much more difficult. Besides that, keywords are still important and I wouldn’t throw them out of my search engine marketing efforts completely.

Most website design elements do not help you with search engine marketing, but that doesn’t mean that some elements of web design can’t help you. There is evidence that paying attention to website design elements can improve your chances of ranking in the search engines.

The most talked about example of web design and SEO is the use of Flash presentations. While Flash is beginning to be a crawlable element now, this is still a brand new development where search engines are concerned. That means the crawlability of Flash is still limited. I would not build a website that is created entirely with Flash elements.

Other things to consider with web design and SEO are:

• Placement of excessive links in your footer
• The use of excessive code
• Navigation elements
• Using alt tags with graphic and photo elements
• Hidden links and redirects can hurt you in the rankings
• Use an inverted pyramid style for information and presentation elements
• Use external files as much as possible for extraneous code like JavaScript

There are many more ways that web design can affect SEO. You would be doing yourself a favor to learn and study SEO and web design to some reasonable degree before you build your website.

Your competitors are full of valuable information and believe it or not, they just can’t wait to shove it down your throat. You can subscribe to their blogs through RSS feeds or email, or you can become a subscriber to their newsletters, and you can become followers or friends on any of their social media presences. The danger is that you’ll gain too much information.

Knowing what your competition is doing is a necessity and always has been. The best offline businesses are the ones that have always strategically placed themselves to best advantage – and you can’t accomplish that without knowing where you competition is, and what they are doing. The online business world is no different. What is different are the methods used to obtain some of that information.

You can research and spend some time spying on your competitors – or you can let them send you information. The reality is that you will need to do both. Your own research will uncover a lot of the un-publicized data ( such as keywords) – but that flood of information coming out in the form of blog posts and newsletters for example, can also help to build a picture  of where they are at and what sort of threat they present to your business.

Internet marketing can be a two way street – while you are out there promoting your business, you need to be aware of how your competitors are promoting theirs. Are you subscribing to any of the information that your they provide? You should – it’s free and they can’t wait to send it to you!

Competitive intelligence relies on information, more precisely, data in the form of raw numbers or words. Just looking at a competitors pages can provide you with a lot of information, however, knowing what keywords they may be targeting, who is linking in to them, and what sort of traffic they may be receiving can all be important to your forward planning.  To obtain this information, you need a good set of tools – a set of tools that you are comfortable in using.

When it comes to SEO for example, Firefox is generally the browser used by most professionals. There is huge assortment of add-ons available for Firefox, all free and many of them fairly easy to use. The hardest part is actually building your tool box of tools – sorting the good from the bad, then learning how to gain the most from each tool.

Forums can be a good starting point. Talking to others, finding out which tools they prefer and why. You can also find some good tips on how to get the best our of a particular tool.  Visiting mozilla.org is another good place to start. You can search the database of add-ons, many of which have user reviews along with information on what each add-on can do.

Learn about each tool before putting it to use otherwise you will either not be getting the best out of the tool, or you will be receiving misinformation rather than valuable information. Used effectively, you can learn a lot about your competitors web sites, who links to them, and how well placed they are in the search results.

Rich snippets – the idea sounds great in principle. Enter data using a special code that the search engines recognize and have that data added to your pages listing in the search results. Ratings, prices, telephone numbers, opening hours; it all sounds great – in principle.

Judging from many of the responses on Google’s Knol page on the subject (unanswered questions at that), you would have to wonder if they were worth the effort. I think it is for a number of reasons, namely:

1. It’s the way of the future. While Google isn’t using them extensively as yet, the time will come when this data is used across the board. Including them now means your pages are prepared and you wont have to go back through your pages to update them later.
2. They are being used now. While there is no guarantee that your rich snippet will appear your search results, many are. The only saying “you have to be in it to win it” comes to mind. If you don’t include rich snippets, you wont see them in your search listings.

When it comes to winning a click from a user, the more relevant information you can have displayed in the search results the better. If your competitors are showing rich snippet information and you are not, there is a good chance they will win the clicks – that’s not good for your business.

That title may sound a little far fetched and, compared to Facebook, 17 million US Twitter users isn’t a lot. But then, it really does depend on what those 17 million users are actually doing. Edison Research has releases an interesting three year study on Twitter usage and the numbers are looking good for marketers.

When it comes to awareness, 87% of Americans are aware of Twitter (88% for Facebook) so the brand is out there. We all know that Twitter is growing at a fairly fast rate, but how valuable is it for your business? To begin with, two-thirds of Twitter users access the site using their mobile phone. This often means they are accessing information while they are out and about – that’s a great time to hit them with special offers if you have a bricks and mortar business.

Other interesting stats include:

• 42 percent use Twitter to learn about products/services;
• 41 percent user Twitter to provide opinions about products and services;
• 31 percent use Twitter to ask for opinions about products and services;
• 28 percent use Twitter to look for discounts or sales;
• 21 percent use Twitter to purchase products/services; and
• 19 percent use Twitter to seek customer support.

That data suggests that Twitter users are more open to receiving product information than perhaps those on Facebook. It also means that Twitter could be a valuable tool for keeping an eye open your competition. With 31% of users looking for opinions on products and services, you want your brand or business being recommended, not your opposition. If it isn’t, you do at least have an indication of what online marketing areas need a boost.

Twitter is small compared to Facebook, but it is still a valuable resource when it comes to marketing and getting your brand out there. It is also a great resource for spying on the competition. Can you afford to ignore it?

Early last week we reported on how Most Small Business Owners Are Too Busy For Social Media. There are many different ways to view this problem, some of which we discussed in last weeks post. Another view that should be considered is whether or not small businesses were targeting the right social media outlets.

If your a small business person targeting a local or regional audience then you need to consider your options. It may not make sense undertaking a social media marketing campaign on Facebook or any of the other large international social media sites. Your audience is not international so why campaign in an international marketplace?

There are always local or regional social media outlets that could return much greater dividends for the time spent. Sure, they don’t have all the bells and whistles that Facebook or Twitter posses, but they do have one important factor – the users are nearly all potential customers.

As a local trader, would you advertise in the local papers or radio – or would you advertise in a big city daily or on national tv. The commonsense approach, and the cost factor, would make your local media more attractive. The same is true for online social media. Target those sites and then judge whether or not social media marketing was worth the time.

Search engine optimization is a tough game and sometimes you reach a point where your competitors have to0 many guns in their arsenal for you to outrank. If you can get to position two or three in search results, perhaps you can outsell them instead.

Meta tags are pretty much redundant when it comes to on-page SEO. The smart move now is to use those meta tags to outsell your competitors and the perfect place to start is in the description tag. This provides the snippet that searchers see in organic search results.

Rather than optimizing for keywords, try optimizing for clicks. This means using that tag to sell and like all sales pitches you need a call to action. Rewrite your meta description so that it gives the searcher a reason to click through – then invite them.

If you can get to the front page of the serps, particularly the results above the fold then start to concentrate on ways of winning those clicks. If you can out sell your competitors you should see a significant share of the traffic coming your way.

Last week we talked about competitive intelligence in a corporate world. It’s an important part of any business whether online or offline.  Competitive intelligence is also important when it comes to marketing. In an online world that competitive intelligence extends to search engine placement as well as online marketing.

How does competitive intelligence relate to search engine placement? SEO or search engine optimization is the process of gaining the best possible place on the search results pages for any search involving your keywords.

The key part of competitive intelligence is the gathering of facts that relate to your competitors.  Some of the information gathered includes:

• Keywords and keyphrases
• Inbound links
• Associated websites
• Partnerships
• Social marketing tactics

The gathering of facts is, however, only one part of competitive intelligence. The most important part is knowing how to filter that data, what to do with the filtered data and finally how to compare it against your own site(s).

Just because a competitor uses a set of keywords doesn’t mean you should as well. In fact, your competitive advantage may be the fact you do use a different set of keywords.

In that situation, your concern should be how to protect your advantage since competitive intelligence is a two way street – yes, they could well be researching you. Whilst worrying how to get ahead of the rest, don’t forget to stay in front of those behind you.

Duplicate content is again hitting the headlines around the net, this time for all the right reasons. In the past many believed that search engines such as Google penalized sites that had duplicate content issues – this is not true. That doesn’t mean that duplicate content is harmless, it can create a lot of problems for your pages.

Is duplicate content then an SEO issue or a web design issue. Like many things related to search engine rankings, it is both. Or rather, it is one that leads to another. If your web design, more importantly, your site architecture includes dynamic parameters then the chances are you will have duplicate content issues.

If you can see URLs that include question marks, strange characters, or have terms such as ?sid=12395923 added to the end – you have dynamic URLs. Yahoo! and Google allow webmasters to control what parameters in URLs they want ignored.

In Yahoo!, the option is available through Site Explorer. In Google, Webmaster Tools has the option under Site Configuration > Settings. It is important to control which versions of a page are indexed.

If more than one URL points to a page then you could be leaking link juice. The more link juice you leak, the lower your page will rank in search results. Control which pages are indexed and you will gain a little control over the flow of link juice – an essential component of SEO. You work hard for links – why waste them.

You may feel your search engine marketing efforts are paying off and all is going well – they could be too. However, you should always be reviewing your activities to ensure you are get the most out of your campaigns.

Search Engine Journal has a timely post that provides seven tips to increasing your landing page conversions – we could all use an increase in conversions, even at the best of times. Consider reviewing the following in relation to your landing pages:

• Call to Actions Matter – is your call to action clear
• Digestible content – is your content scanable
• Minimize choice – don’t confuse things with too many choices
• Keep It SIMPLE – create simple pages
• Keep form length to a minimum – only collect the data you need
• Avoid marketing speak – use every day language
• Envoke Trust – if I trust your site, I will buy from you

Although very obvious areas to review, over time our pages get out of hand – reign them in and with luck, your conversions will start to climb. The post makes one point that is worth repeating:

Landing pages are becoming overly complicated data dumps where the short attention spanned consumer is left to sort through the pop-ups, multiple focus points, talking heads and flashing pictures. No wonder bounce rates are astronomical on most sights. Let’s stop blaming poor market conditions….

Now go back and look at your landing pages in relation to that description. How does it measure up? Many don’t measure up and by trimming them back you can make them lean, mean conversion machines.

For many years the name of the search engine optimization game has been to target Google. The more articles you read the more often you will come across references to Google, Matt Cutts or Webmaster Tools. Every now and then, Yahoo! or Bing creeps into the conversation.

The theory has been that Google gets the majority of traffic so that is the place to rank. It has been a reasonable theory too and most sites find that if they get it right for Google, they are close to getting it right for the others.

Yahoo! recently announced a new search design and at the same time made a little noise about targeting people search.  A search for a person will produce results which include profiles Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed.  Their aim, to be number one for people search.

It was not so long ago that reports indicated that Bing was doing well in the travel, retail and finance sectors when it came to searches.

If the search engines are going to target certain niches, perhaps the time has come to reassess our search engine optimization strategies. If your site is based on travel, retail or finance, it may be time to focus your search engine optimization strategies on areas that will help you rank well on Bing.

Many will argue that you can optimize for all three search engines, and you can. However, we still bring the focus back to Google – perhaps it is time to change that.

Have you ever wondered how you could keep you  costs down whilst  increasing traffic to your  site? The new Adwords Bid Simulator tool may be able to answer some of those questions.

It’s not a crystal ball and the information you glean from it is only a rough guide. However, the information it does provide does at least have some statistical basis behind it amd can help to tweak your pay-per-click campaigns.

The tool works by analyzing the last seven days traffic and then calculating revised impressions, clicks and cost in relation to changes in the maximum Cost-Per-Click. In other words, if you were to raise or lower your bid prices, what effect would it have on costs and traffic.

If you would like to test it out, just view all your campaigns in the AdWords interface.  From there,  select the keywords tab and sort all your keywords by click volume.  A blue icon should appear alongside the current CPC for all high-volume keywords; click on the icon and you can play around with the data.

As I said, it’s not a crustal ball but it can provide some interesting data. You can find out more from the the Google Adsense blog here.

Web design, site structure and internal linking can all lead to problems that can ultimately affect your search rankings.  A post on Bing’s Webmaster Center highlights the effect of poor design and what steps should be taken to ensure your web sites gains the most from your efforts.

There are times when the general theme coming from some blogs is that search engines are the enemy. In reality, if your site is providing valuable content then the search engines want it – they want to be able to tell the world about it. Rather than being the enemy, they can be a web site owners best friend. It’s simply matter of listening to what they want, how they want it presented and supplying it. As the Bing post stated:

….if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines.

It’s common sense. If the search engine bots cannot read certain pages – they won’t be indexed and if they are not  indexed, they won’t appear in the search results.

Simply tasks like using Redirects when pages are moves; adding a Robots file to block out certain areas of your website that don’t need indexing; and providing clear and keyword targeted page and directory titles should be standard practice.

If you can ensure your site is easily spidered by the bots then you should find your pages being indexed. If pages are not being indexed, have a closer look to try and determine why. Find and fix the issue and you will reap the rewards through search traffic.

Pay per click marketing can be a stressful past time for many web site owners particularly if they are in a competitive niche where costs per click can be high.  If your walking a tight line between profitable and unprofitable costs then it may be time to rethink your pay per click strategies and look at some of the lesser known PPC options.

There are quite a few alternate search engines around that offer pay per click advertising, often with lower costs per click than the big boys like Google.  The hard part is finding these alternatives. A search of Google will help you find a good handful of alternatives.

Once you have a list of alternative pay per click search engines, sit down and do some research. Sign up and create a few ads, check out their interfaces, and see what sort of costs per click you may be up for. Many of them can provide the same keyword advertising program but at much less costs.

If you have the funds, create a few trial ads and let them run for a few days. This will give you an idea of what costs you are likely to face, what sort of click through rate you are receiving, and most importantly, what sort of conversion rates you are achieving.

You would be surprised at the amount of traffic you can generate through these alternate search engines. You may also find you are achieving better conversion rates – if that’s the case, your ROI will simply get better.

ReTweeting has become an important component of the Twitter experience and could perhaps create a Digg like experience for users. One gets the feeling that reTweets are now more important than the original Tweet and if the original Tweet has a marketing angle, the viral marketing angle can be tremendous.

As proof of the popularity of reTweets, Twitter is looking to add a re-Tweet function to the site. There are already plenty of third party re-Tweet options around already, each providing Digg like re-Tweet buttons.

WebProNews provides a list of the benefits of re-Tweets:

• Retweets are viral

• Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed

• As opposed to a Facebook “like,” a retweet is shared with everyone

• Retweets typically give credit to sources

• While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships

• Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content

• Retweets can inspire further conversation

• Retweets can be good for branding

• Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.

• Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content

The practice of re-Tweeting is growing and as businesses start to see the value in Twitter as a marketing tool – viral marketing will bloom.

A reputation is a valuable thing. Businesses, both small and large, are required from time to time to defend theirs, while others provide such pristine service to their customers that they are virtually infallible. However, the best way to protect one’s reputation is to prevent slander from ever surfacing. While no one can control the information that is passed around on the Internet, via blogs, forums, articles and comments, there are many measures that can be taken in order to secure the name of your business in search results. From experience, many internet marketing firms have learned the importance of preventative Reputation Management versus that which must occur post-concern.

Hands down, it is always easier to prevent search results from returning bad opinions than it is to remove those that have already been showing up. The idea behind reputation management isn’t always to hide bad opinions, because there are many bad internet marketing practices in effect, and sometimes, slandering others is how some companies go about improving their own reputation. It’s logical - diminish the credibility of another and automatically yours will augment in comparison – but this is not an ethical practice, and like it or not, those of us whom actually market our businesses ethically must do so in the face of black-hat methods.

Since reputation management is not strictly preventative, there is hope. A significant portion of any effective reputation management effort does not come down to fighting fire with fire – in other words, and as an analogy to the political front, mudslinging will only fuel false accusations and unnecessary name-calling. Therefore, the key to effective reputation management is to take all the good things about your business or company and put them out there for the world to see, so that all the bad things will be shown in their true light as outliers in an otherwise, and formerly, unbalanced statistic-driven equation.

Blog posts, press releases, and reviews are just the start of all the examples of methods by which to distribute positive content about your business. A great way to show the public the truth about your business or company is to acquire the statements of satisfied customers and share them with everyone through any one of (or all) of the previously mentioned methods. There are two sides to the exposure needed to reach as many people as possible with these positive opinions – on one side of things, sending these opinions into high-traffic areas is key, while on the other end of things, performing techniques similar to SEO are required in order to present positive content to those searching for you by name.

All in all, depending on the circumstances, managing one’s reputation can be a task beyond the ability of anyone short of a professional and experienced Internet marketing firm, which is shy it is important to consult a firm like Reciprocal Consulting.

While Microsoft’s BING search engine isn’t exactly news, I thought I’d share my initial thoughts concerning it’s appearance on the scene.

Bing has brought a traffic increase to Microsoft. Exciting news for them, but don’t get excited yet! Whether you are in the business of Internet marketing or simply looking into your options for hiring an internet marketing firm, consider the following:

• Making the Switch- before everyone rushes over to BING for their marketing needs, be it Pay Per Click or not, there are a lot of facets to each engine. While Yahoo! has been at bay in the number 2 spot under Google for a long time, there are many campaigns that don’t work on Google and do work on Yahoo! Just because a site is bigger does not make it better, and while jumping on any given bandwagon may seem like a good plan, there is no rush. Should BING continue in its success, it will only further establish the engine, and thus, it will still be there later on. Still, if you’re one of the people that can’t wait to dive into a new channel and truly believes that a new engine is the way to go, there are other things to consider first.
• Duplicate Content- On a Google search, as a primary example, you will find multiple links to the same site. Between all links to the same domain, there will be home page links, interior links, and potentially file links, like .pdf files and the like. BING, however, is a different story. As of recently, the BING algorithm is designed to remove duplicate content, for the purpose of only showing the most relevant page on a given site matching the search query. This may or may not be a good thing for your site. Many sites might have many similar products or services listed on the home page or on interior pages, in which case a direct link to one product might not be optimal. For eCommerce sites, this could improve ROI since, assuming the product or service page is most relevant to the search terms, such a user would be inspired to buy the product or sign up right then and there. For some businesses, however, browsing is all part of the purchase process, so taking users directly to a product page may very well give them the impression that this is the only option they have. However, even under this circumstances, site optimization will play a role in the success of your online marketing efforts.
• Site Optimization – Another thing to consider is the layout and organization of your site. Suppose users land on interior pages but do not find what they are looking for – are they easily able to access the home page, other similar products or services, and category pages from all corners of the site? It’s often difficult to find a perfect balance between enough options and too many options – and a website can become quite cluttered with too many links and poor layout / design, so a smart plan of action is to have a professional website, designed by an experience firm that not only understands design concepts and techniques, but it familiar also with Internet marketing strategies that must be implemented on-site. Whether you BING or not, be sure you or your hired marketing firm understands how the search engine being utilized works, and optimizes the site for such engines to return the best results.
• Content- Thus far, it is rumored that BING weighs on-site content over all. This means that a site featuring picture galleries without ample description, sites lacking company’s information, and sites without rich context may be penalized for it. This doesn’t denote a negative effect on rank – just the absence of a positive one. Be sure there is rich on-site content to accompany all the beautiful pictures of your products, staff, facilities, etc. A site should read well in your language, because this is what search engines look for.
• Complaints - Despite its swift jump to #2, BING has still received many complaints about how the engine ranks sites. For example, with giving equal weight to interior and home pages on a site, it may find a lower-ranking interior page to be more relevant, and therefore return that page lower in search results, where as a search engine like Google, which displays both interior and home pages, factors in the home page rank as well when considering the position of results. Another problem that many might find with BING, although not quite an official outcry from users, is the weight it gives to interior links compared to the weight it gives to external links. In recent years, it’s always been understood that while on-site SEO is important, it should not factor into rank as much as relevance. On BING, however, it seems that proper linking structure within a site will do more for your rank and relevance than it will on Google, which is known for giving much more weight to exterior links for both rank and relevance. This might be a problem, or it might be good for those with well-optimized websites.
• Pay Per Clickon BING – As I mentioned above, BING’s algorithm is quite unique compared to Google and Yahoo, so for anyone planning to experiment with a PPC campaign on BING, approach with caution. I would not recommend ending a PPC campaign on Google or Yahoo just to replace it with one on BING. I’ve always said that exploring the options is a good way to feel things out and find what works for each business, so I would encourage delegating some budget, or even better, increasing a budget to see what BING can actually do for your company – just don’t put all of your eggs into this basket because it’s fresh and new.

All in all, I’m impressed with BING, but I can’t say I’m surprised at all. Microsoft has been around for a long time and they obviously know their way around IT. I’d say that a gradual transition is best, but even better when managed by an experienced Internet marketing firm.

Too often, it seems that SEO’s and those interested in hiring them alike get caught up with the numbers and the costs. It is true, Search Engine Optimization is a business, but this doesn’t mean that it must be approached with the utmost hesitation to engage in personal relationships. A lot of times, the interaction between a firm and a client will be the difference between success and failure, so it would only make sense that we should all consider these relationships to be as valuable as all the analytics in the world.

The first step to a healthy manager-client relationship is trust. It makes me a bit angry every time I see an SEO website with empty promises and bad practices they are sold with bells and whistles. It doesn’t help that much of the on-site copy for firms are not always an indication. Every firm should be proud of their services and know what they are capable of, so while an experienced firm will present their methods in a way that makes sense to the potential client and put forth a legitimate sales-pitch, the firm that potential clients should avoid are capable of writing the same sort of copy. This is why it is crucial to talk with a firm, ask questions, and be honest. There are people you’ll meet that are up front regardless of how feelings are affected, and as much as the initial reaction to such people may force us to dislike them, once we can see that they are upfront for the benefit of the other person, we have to admire them. This is how a firm should be with their clients. It’s important to know how to optimize a site, and it’s important to have the tools and knowledge to collect the necessary data in order to do so, but even more important is setting up a relationship with the client in which they are free to ask questions, express concerns, and are confident that the firm is doing everything it can to maximize their ROI.

Once a client can trust their SEO firm, the lines of communication must be strong and clear. Along with that trust comes the ability to continually interact under the same circumstances. It does no good to the firm or the client to sell an idea and then take the campaign in a direction that makes the client nervous or uncomfortable. Sure, a lot of this concern could be based on performance but even when a campaign is doing well, if the communication is not there, the client will have cause for concern. Every client should find a firm with which they can get in touch with easily and feel comfortable discussing their relationship, as well as the progress of the campaign itself. Healthy communication is just as important as a well optimized site.

Another aspect of any relationship is each member’s desire to see the other succeed. A firm should always rejoice in the success of their clients and personally deal with failures. While none of us would like to admit that some campaigns just don’t work out, there will be times when failure will occur, and even though the campaign is coming to an end, the relationship shouldn’t. Many times, the reason an SEO effort doesn’t succeed is due to poor timing. Many campaigns have a window of opportunity that might be missed at no fault of the client or the firm. SEO is part science and part experiment. The secrets of the Internet Universe are unobtainable to everyone, and no firm is an exception to that rule.

So firms, your clients’ websites are your own, and their succeess is yours! Clients, your firm wants you to succeed, and we know that you want us to succeed because that means that you are succeeding! The relationship between a firm and a client is a very important one, and it should never be overlooked.

For those interested in a relationship with an Internet marketing firm like Reciprocal Consulting, please, don’t be shy.

It’s no secret that bloggers contribute a lot to the opinions on the Internet today, as well as the efficiency of a lot of SEO campaigns. Old strategies are dying out because of the social media network, and bloggers are a large part of this (not so recently) new network. There are a lot of ways to promote your business through a blog, the first step of which is to start a blog!

This blog should offer something useful, neat, or just plain fun – whatever the case, you can’t expect to attract readers with bad content, so here are the first steps of a great blog:

1. Choose a good theme that is relavant to the business and optimize the blog with related keywords. This means content rich, organized, and easy on the eyes. Whether you’ve shelled out for a self hosted blog or your blog is hosted on a blogging site, there are plenty of free themes for WordPress blogs out there. We generally recommend WordPress because it is more professional and better for SEO purposes. Choose your URL based on the company name. You may have to get creative if there are other businesses out there with similar or same names.
2. Generate valuable content. The content should be consistant (posting at least once or twice a week), and contain useful information, interesting news, fun facts, or neat pictures. Whatever theme you’ve gone with, maintain it! If you decide to change things up in the future, do so gradually. Organize the blog with an “about us” page, a way to contact the administer of the blog, and utilize the perma-link option, so your post URL’s can be read in plain English and associated with the content on the blog (as well as potential search queries that can lead to the blog).
3. Don’t ignore old posts. A lot of bloggers have the tendancy to post and be done with it. The problem there is that after awhile, this content is virtually useless to search engines. A lot of things are taken into consideration when an engine decides to show an interior page as a result, but recency is part of it. If the post hasn’t been touched in 6 months, it might as well not be there. One way to keep things active is to re-visit old posts and see if there’s some piece of information that needs to be added, or something that might need to be changed if something about the company has also changed. Just be sure to inform readers of changes made to avoid confusion about the posts. A strikethrough on over omitted sentences is common, and a notice of something added is also typical in posts that have been edited.
4. Encourage Discussion. Once the blog begins to get a readership, post about topics that motivate visitors to state their opinions. The key is to hit a topic that many people have a voice on, but not to be extreme in a “company” opinion on the matter. You can take a bit of a risk posting an extreme opinion on any matter, and feul a comment-hosted-argument, which doesn’t make any blog look that great. The advantage to the administer of the blog is the ability to delete inappropriate content posted as comments (or to not approve them at all if comments first require approval), but readers can catch on to this and feel like you’re only doing so to protect your reputation, and not have a legitimate discussion about the topic.

Beyond regular posting and blog maintenance there is a world of SEO that can be done for a blog, but these basic beginning steps are necessary for a search engine optimization effort to be effective for the blog. For more information about social media and search engine optimization, feel free to get in touch with Reciprocal Consulting, an Internet marketing firm that can help.