Blog Posting: How To Stop Others From Commenting For SEO

Blog posting can be fun, but it can also be aggravating when you are providing real help to individuals who will see the value in your blog and you are suddenly inundated with scammers trying to get attention by commenting for SEO. There are three methods you can make certain to stop the comments from happening.

Check the Origin of the Comment

Before you ever accept, edit, and post a comment check the web URL attached to the poster. They might have a wonderful comment, but the URL is totally spam, unrelated, or looking like it is not someone you want to be associated with. Never accept something that looks like it is going to be spam related. For example if you offer advice about sharing and retaining memories and the poster is from a dating company.

Quality of the Written Post

The lower the quality of the post, the lower the quality of the comment. This is not to say that there are not many who have poor grammar skills. A genuine commenter who really does find value in your blog posting can have poor writing skills; however, they are not usually linked with poor origins. By comparing the origin URL with the quality of the post you know whether to accept it.

Post a Disclaimer

At the bottom of every post or when you receive comments post a disclaimer. Make sure you tie it to the proper blog posting if you do so in comments. Tell those trying to comment that you will report spam.

Building Off-Site SEO by Blog Posting

One of the factors that contributes to your ranking score in online search engines is whether or not you have some external reference, or external links pointed at your site. This is called off-site SEO and it is supposed to be based on the fact that if your site is being pointed at, it must be because it has something interesting, which also builds up some credibility among users. The problem is that not all of these links will be good publicity so here are some issues to have in mind when trying to build off-site SEO by blog posting.

Not All Publicity Is Publicity At All

• There are several reasons this phrase is true when it comes to blogging and back links. First of all, some search engines have banned blogs because of their publicity sales, so be careful and check who and where you are signing up.
• Other thing to have in mind is to write articles that are really unique and that make you stand out from the rest  if your article is not unique it will probably be detected and ignored by search engines.

Be Careful Who You Rub Your Shoulders With

• Along with these last point, try to have in mind that if your article is posted on a general interest blog it may have less relevance, but if your article is posted on an industry-specific blog it is more likely to be less unique.
• Also remember that your article may end up on the same blog as your competition, or sensitive material which you don’t want your product or service to be related to, such as adult or political content.

The Promotion of a Promotion Is Not a Promotion

• Finally, some blogs re post what other blogs have published, or they promote other blogs which creates kind of a blog network. Sometimes you will be tempted to participate in this, but you should know that when this happens, your article simply fades away in the rankings because the repetition ends up taking away its relevance.

These are a few, but very important factors you should have in mind when blog posting. If you can get your article to be unique, and on a specific unnecessarily over-promoted blogging network you will most likely start to see the benefits of off-site SEO in just a few days.

Helpfulness of Blog Posting Services

Once upon a time, websites served people in a variety of ways. However, the concept has now changed and has made websites somewhat different. The limits on websites have now exceeded and serve readers in a huge variety of ways. If you use the internet on a regular basis, then you will definitely be familiar with blog posting and blogs, which provide information on all niches you can possibly think of.

Selling Services and Products

Website owners who have the intention of selling services and products also benefit from blog posting, as this brings a lot of traffic to their site, which results in super-sales. Blog posting can work wonders for all website owners, especially if their goal is to increase, improve, or generate more traffic to their website.

The Basic Idea

The basic idea behind blog SEO services is both understandable and simple. Just stick to creating content that is high quality, catchy and unique for someone’s blog. By providing this generous help, your result will be the backlinks you receive for your website. The backlinks will not only help with SEO, but will also bring a lot of traffic to your site, which will list your site amongst the SERP’s.

Unique and Quality Blogs

If you have a wide range of blogs that are unique and high quality, you should get in touch with blog owners and target the ones that are most relevant to your content. You also need to assure them that your written blog will work for their business. Another thing you must not forget to mention is they can always get in touch with you via email, in order to get more details. Those that are seriously interested will definitely respond to your proposal, which is why you may want to consider emailing about ten blog owners daily. One thing you must ensure is the content you have created is high quality. This allows you to get a better response from readers.

Get Going Now

There is no reason to wait any longer! You should get started and create as many blogs as you can. Once this is done, you can get posting into your favourite blog resource and get in touch with blog owners, who will put the promotion services for your blog into effect

Basics of Blog Posting

Blogs are important to help one promote their business. However, no matter how significant blogs are for a company, there are many businesses out there that don’t have a blog. Companies that have blogs don’t keep them updated with any latest posts; however, this is very important, as updating blogs with current posts is an essential requirement for blog posting. Below are some blog basics for your business.

Business and the Importance of Blogs
60% of the population participates in social media networking and blogging. This is because many customers enjoy reading new blogs on sites, which helps increase traffic. An effective way for promoting your site is through blog posting and social media networking. This will keep everyone updated about sales and discounts, upcoming product release and any developments of your company. Regularly updating your blogs also gives excellent SEO benefits. This is because when Google crawls, then it looks for any new updates and content. Back linking to other blogs and websites give you high-quality black linking power, which improves your search ranking.

Does Every Business Need A Blog?
Before you consider a blog, you need to be sure you will take out the time to regularly update it. A well-maintained blog requires around two to three fresh posts a week. And for this purpose, you can either write the blog posts yourself or hire a freelance writer to do the job for you. Every business is different. If your business niche is interesting and requires customer’s comments, then a blog is a must for you. Receiving feedback from clients means you will get a knowhow of the pros and cons others think of your service. This will help to make your business better, which will generate more traffic and boost your service. If blogging is done properly, it will always benefit your business and never let you down.

What Happens Once You Have A Blog?
Once you have started your blog, you need to ensure you post regularly. This not only makes it interesting, but is also good for search engines. Creating a successful blog will take time and effort. You cannot expect a miracle to happen overnight. Include a conversational tone in your blog and try not to use technical terms. A friendly tone will make customer’s want to read on and return. Usable and knowledgeable content is a must, so your readers can benefit. The length of each post needs to be around 350-450 words. Anything longer than this will result in a boring experience for your customers, which is why you need to keep it short, snappy and enjoyable!

Using Social Media to Publicize Your Blog Posting

The use of social media continues to grow and sites such as Facebook and Twitter are multibillion dollar companies with huge numbers of users posting and interacting every day. This is a huge audience and even having a tiny part of it can help you reach more people and stay in contact with them.

Which Social Media Site To Use?
This can be a very interesting question and the answer can be any or all of them. You should think about the audience of your blog and how often you are blog posting. Twitter is great for letting people know about a new post and short messages with links. Regular messages are fine and not seen in a negative way. Facebook and even more so LinkedIn would see lots of messages as a negative and could see people leaving your site. The content also needs to be considered and using an obvious sales technique is going to be very badly received on LinkedIn and to a lesser extent Facebook.

Building Links for Your Blog
When you are using your blog posting activities to publicize products and services on your website then linking to social media sites not only helps to raise the blogs profile but also the website it is connected to. It also provides a conduit that people that see the social media posts can follow to the blog and then to your website. This is a low cost way of building up a network of content links that can bring in a surprising amount of customers if executed well.

Content First Sales Second
One of the largest problems with using blogs and social media for marketing is being over eager to get a sales message out. When you concentrate on quality content that is relevant and informative then as long as information that can lead people to your sales area is included it has done its job.

Automating Posting
You might think about introducing an automated posting plug in or API that will take the content that is in your blog posting and include a snippet and a link on social media sites. You might want to get your website or SEO professional to set this up for you. They make it simple to distribute when a new blog is posted and you can have more than one setup to cover all of the sites you are targeting.

How to Approach Blog Posting so it Works

The blogosphere is littered with one or two post wonders where people set everything up and then for whatever reason abandoned their shiny new blog. Here are some ways that will help you get into a better frame of mind so that you get into the habit of blog posting regularly.

Are You A Serial Blog Killer?
If this is you then no matter if you are doing this for your business or personally you are leaving a trail of blogs abandoned and not being updated. Having several blogs is common but if you have little formal writing experience the time it takes to make a single coherent and informative post can leave you constantly put off updating your blogs.

The solution is to backup and delete any blog you haven’t got time for and only concentrate on a single or a couple of core blogs. This takes away the pressure and lets you do your best for the one or two blogs that you are concentrating on.

Always Be Regular
The number one rule is to post regularly! This will help you to build your audience and also contribute to any SEO that you are using the blog for. It is far less important to have the perfect blog than to have a good blog that is posted at regular intervals.

Have a System
It is important to have a system to how you write you approach blog posting. This means having times that you do things. You might like to choose a topic in the morning, write a list of points in the afternoon and flesh out the blog in the evening. You may prefer to set aside a block of time to do the whole process. As long as you have a system you sticking to it is easier and producing posts becomes less of a problem

Write Down Ideas
If you have a sudden inspiration then write it down almost every phone has an area you can add notes or record your voice. Take the time to get your idea down and you will find it much easier to make great content for your blog posting.

Learn How Blog Posting Can Increase Your Search Rankings

Blog posting is a great method for creating backlinks to your website. Backlinks are used by search engines when determining rankings. The better your website’s search engine rankings, the more visitors your site will get. The hardest part of having a website is getting people to visit your website. By using organic SEO techniques, you can increase your number of visitors. Blog posting is one of the easiest ways to begin implementing good website SEO.

To start getting your website a first page placement in search rankings, find blog sites that cover topics that are relevant to your website. Read articles on the blog and comment on articles when you can provide useful information. Some comment sections allow you to insert the URL for your website along with your name. If there is no spot for entering your URL, place it at the bottom of your comment. That is the basics of blog posting. Each time you do this, you are creating a backlink to your website.

When you find a website that appears relevant to your website and good for blog posting, find out how much traffic they get and what their search rankings are. There are several websites that will provide a detailed breakdown of how much traffic a website receives each month. Backlinks are much more useful when they come from quality sites. For example, a backlink from CNN is of higher quality than a backlink from a random blog that gets a few hundred visitors a month. This is all part of using proper website SEO to increase your rankings.

If you do not think that you will have the time for blog posting, then consider hiring an affordable SEO company. Many of these companies will post to blogs for a small fee. They can also perform the same task with forum posting. Forum posting is similar to blog posts, except done on forum threads. These services are usually very affordable and performed by individuals that know how to find quality blogs and forums to post to. Begin increasing the number of visitors to your website, start blog posting today.

The SEO Benefits of Custom Blog Creation

Custom blog creation — that is to say, having an SEO company build you a blog specifically for the purpose of SEO and social media — is a huge part of almost every Internet-presence building plan these days. There’s a good reason why; there are things that a carefully-created blog can do that nothing else can.

Easy Keywords For SEO
When you set up your blog, you set it up after your SEO company has done all the keyword research for your main site — and you set it up with your best keywords in several places around blog.

• The categories that you file your posts into should include your keywords.
• The tags you add to each blog post should include your keywords.
• The title of each article should include one keyword
• That means that the permalink URL will also include that same keyword.
• The content of each post should include at least a couple of your keywords, ideally as anchor text for a link back to your landing page.

And that doesn’t even include any SEO plugins, which can add:

• An article summary which should also include the same keyword that appears in the title.
• A keywords box that essentially acts much like the Tags box all over again.
• Potentially other text fields for you to slip more keywords into.

The point of all of this is that because you have so many places to put your keywords in, you don’t have to worry about the keyword density of your posts themselves at all. Just make sure that the keywords you put in the tags, keyword box, et cetera are the same ones that you have once each in your copy, and you’re done.

Easy Linkups for Social Media
There are also a plethora of plugins that can turn every one of your blog postings into a mini social media center. Buttons that let readers easily mention your post on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, or GooglePlus sit pretty right next to links to your company’s own accounts on each of those social media sites. Allow people to link up not just your posts, but other people’s comments on the social sites, and your blog will love the extra backlinks; Google doesn’t care if the backlink leads to a comment or to the main body, it’ll still boost your SERPs.

There are good reasons every SEO plan in the world involves building you a blog — they’re amazing tools for getting seen, and getting seen is everything in the online game.

Social Bookmarking Is Just The Tip Of The Iceblog

Yeah, iceblog. Because this here piece is all about how social bookmarking is just one (albeit critical) part of socially advertising each and every blog posting your company creates.

We’re clever.

No matter how awesome your blog posts are, if you don’t find a way to get the word out, no one is going to know that James in the Web Department (or Michael the ghostwriter in Seattle) is pumping out awesome content for your website. Sure, if he keeps it up for a year or two, someone will eventually stumble upon him and he’ll blow up crazy large, but until then, you’re basically sitting on your thumbs.

So, you advertise your blog — how? Well, the natural place to start is on social bookmarking sites like Pinterest, Digg, and so on. Why is that the natural place? Because if you really have killer content, it’ll speak for itself and the social bookmarking sites will vote you up — which means more traffic.

Of course, once you’ve done that, you’re done, right? Of course not! Did you even read the title? This is all about all of the work you put in “under the water” trying to get your blog posts read. What else should you be doing?

Interlinking Your Content
When you mention something relevant to a different piece of content in your current post, link it! Not only will you increase the amount of time people spend reading your content, but you’ll be sending clear messages to Google about which pages of content are about which topics.

Submitting Old Posts as Articles
After a post has been up for a few months, it’s lost it’s “new content” shine, and it’s more than OK to syndicate that stuff. Put it up on article directories, get permission to repost it as a guest post on other blogs, wherever it’ll fit — as long as every copy links back to the original.

RSS Aggregators
An amazing number of people get their news through RSS aggregators — the moment after you hit Post on your blog, go to the top 5 RSS aggregators that deal with news relevant to your blog and ping that page.

Is that all that you can do to promote your blog posts? No. Not by a longshot — but it’s a good start and gets you a good way toward the point of diminishing returns.

Get The Crowds talking With Your Custom Blog: Creating Videos That Grab Attention

There’s a lot of things that you can do with a <href=”http://seo911.com/custom-blog-creation.php”>custom blog. Creating infographics, posting provocative political pieces, serializing a story — or you can create some killer videos and really get the attention of your readers.

“But SEO911,” you say, “I don’t have the budget for a killer video!”

You’re thinking wrong: you’re not looking to make a one-time, awesome video. You will still need those, of course — your landing page isn’t really complete without one — but you can outsource those. We’re talking about a vlog. Not a Smoosh or a Jenna Marbles, mind you, but a blog that talks about thing relevant to your industry, your store, your life, and so forth. There’s enough people out there making Harlem Shake/Gangnam Style mashups that you don’t need to try to be all topical and hip.

What you need to do is say things that people are interested in hearing — and that (and this is the most important thing) you care about — and that relate to your business.

Sound hard? It’s surprisingly not. Here’s a few examples.

Toilet Paper
Let’s say you run a service that delivers groceries and other daily necessities to people in the boondocks, or that can’t get out of their home for some other reason. You’ve got a wealth of material there, but let’s just pick one example: rant about Charmin Ultra Strong toilet paper. “I mean seriously, yes, I want strong toilet paper, but do you have any idea how much this stuff has cost people with septic systems? It’s needs a warning on the package: this toilet paper will make your septic system explode violently and without warning.”

Hydraulic Vacuum Pumps
What if you run a company that sells hydraulic parts to industrial complexes that do things like manufacture the rust that we use to “enrich” flour and breakfast cereals. (Yep. Rust.) How do you make hydraulic vacuum pumps interesting? Well, you could go the funny route — rather than BlendTec’s “Will It Blend”, you could have “Will It Suck?” — but in this case it’s too easy to dip into the crude, so let’s talk about something else interesting about your product. “12 places you’d never expect to find a hydraulic vacuum pump: Fishing boats use them to haul their nets in, construction machines use them to operate, etc. etc.”

Video blog posting is great SEO, but it’s vital that you’re able to get your customers attention — if you’re creative, willing to not take yourself seriously, and persistent, it’ll pay off in spades.

Video Blog “Posting” And Why Vlogs Are The Future of Business

Blog is already a horrible word to say. “Blog.” It sounds like you’re too tired to even say “Blargh” properly. But it gets worse — because if you’ve never heard the term for “video web log”, prepare to wince: it’s called a “Vlog”. That sounds like a cheesy race from the original Star Trek, probably with lobster claws instead of eyebrows.

But vlogs are part of the future of Internet marketing, lobster claws or no. Here’s why: because video rocks the socks off of mere article writing and distribution, blogging, or basically any form of text-based content production. Why? There are three big reasons:

• People like watching videos rather than reading words.
• Google owns YouTube.
• YouTube owns Google

Confused? Let us explain.

The first reason is really just basic psychology: the brain loves to be stimulated, and imagining what’s going on in a book is hard, especially if your imagination muscle is atrophied from years of television. The second two reasons — which are different — are more complicated.

Google Owns YouTube
Google purchased YouTube a while back. What this means for you as someone who is performing regular video blog posting is that crossposting your video to YouTube and linking it back to your vlog is the world’s best way to get your content indexed in minutes. Furthermore, Google has given YouTube every tool you could possibly desire to SEOptimize your video listing — literally every field that you can type in when you post a video is something Google looks at when ranking your video, so you can stuff hundreds of related keywords in there if you so desire.

YouTube owns Google
And by ‘owns’, we mean it in the sense of ‘is the unquestionable victor over’, as in ‘David just owned Goliath’ or ‘The Undertaker’s choke slam just owned HBK.’ Forrester Research did a study a few years back discussing the fact that Google loves video results so much that sites that had no appreciable rankings whatsoever for their text content. If you want to get your videos on Google, getting them on YouTube is one of the easiest ways to do it — it’s still significantly harder from taking candy from a baby, but it’s more like taking some from a hungry teenager (as opposed to a straight-up organic ranking, which is more like taking candy from Chuck Norris. Sure, he’s seventy-something, but apparently he has guns now…so there’s that.)

In short: get a vlog, and post regularly, and crosspost to YouTube — it’s the next level of internet marketing.

Local Internet Marketing Needs a Social Component (and Constant Attention)

If you’re a small business that’s just getting into the local internet marketing scene, you may be under the impression that it’s basically just like the SEO you’re already doing, only with different keywords — ones that add a geographic component. But that’s not local internet marketing, it’s just local SEO. If you want to market, you have to go beyond just ‘the same thing only with a smaller audience’.

So how do you get the word out to local people using digital means? Isn’t the Internet inherently a worldwide thing? Sure, you’re right, there’s no such thing as a ‘local internet’ — but there are plenty of websites out there devoted to your local area. If you live in a place large enough to have a Chamber of Commerce, you live in an area large enough to be marketed to online.

How? It’s simple: find websites that make lists of stuff in your area. It’s not hard, just search for “best in Flattery Hills” or “top in Babushka Park” — almost every area large enough to have a Chamber will have a few people who are devoted to blogging, listing, or otherwise talking about your area online. If nothing else, the Chamber of Commerce and the city websites will sometimes link to vibrant local businesses. Get in touch with those governmental, community, and locally-run sites and ask them what it would take to get a reference.

But that’s just the beginning. The real secret to successful local internet domination is the social media. There’s a “we love our town” page for places as miniscule as Carlsborg, Washington and Gulliver, Michigan — you can certainly find one for the place YOU live. Get your own Facebook page, link it up with your local area pages, and get buttons that link to your Facebook page on every web page, blog posting and other web presence you build, and you’ll be just barely getting started — but that’s better than 99% of your competition, and it’s only uphill from here. That’s right, uphill: it’ll be hard work, but when you get to the top, the view will be well worth the climb.

Get Your Crowd Talking With Branded Blog Posting and Status Updates

If you’re looking to give your site a real boost, and you’re not sure what you can do to give it the lift it needs, then a branded blog could well be the way to go. Blogs dedicated to your website and business aren’t always the most exciting things when you imagine them in your mind, but there’s no doubt that they can lend a certain vitality to your overall appearance on the World Wide Web. Consider your website, and then consider your social media pages. They should all work together, but where’s the glue that binds it all together? Often it can be through a branded blog.

If you look to an organic SEO company to create a custom blog for you, then you are going to have all the facets necessary for a great presence on the net. You well have a hopefully great looking website, a well tended Facebook site, a Twitter page which is active, and the new addition, a branded blog. The idea is to publish your blog posts to your Facebook page and your Twitter page. Tweet with a link to the blog; write status updates mentioning your latest blog post, with al link back to the blog post.

Naturally you will have some widgets on your branded blog page to your Facebook and Twitter pages. All of this creates a lovely merry go round of your content! It makes your social media pages look active, and your blog post has lots of points of reference. It’s also a great chance to give your business a voice, which should make your brand a little more palatable to some of your clients and consumers.

You can easily find SEO companies to tackle your Custom blog creation. It’s not the most expensive thing to set up, and it’s going to work wonders for your business  as long as you put the time in. If you’re active on your blog, your Facebook and your Twitter pages, you should be on to a winner.

Social Bookmarking For Increased Interaction: Where Should You Put the Buttons?

Social bookmarking was once the number one way of socially interacting with other people online — for about two months back in the early noughties, before MySpace and Facebook blossomed — but it’s far from dead today. Digg is still doing basically the same thing today that it did back in the day: gathering the most interesting news (with the definition of ‘interesting’ being crowdsourced) and putting it all where you can read it. Reddit has turned into a hundred different cultures called subReddits that vary in their nature from arch-conservative to /b/tarded (look it up…if you don’t already know.) Other social bookmarking sites from StumbleUpon to the juggernaut called Pinterest are doing darn good business these days, too.

So it’s pretty obvious that getting social bookmarking buttons attached to your content is a good idea — but just slapping buttons all over everything is kind of slapdash (no pun intended). Let’s do a thought experiment.

You’re reading an awesome blog posting — one of the best you’ve read in a long time. It’s teaching you, inspiring you, and making you reconsider some of your fundamental assumptions about some aspect of your life. You’ve just reach the crescendo, and you’re thinking about how much your cousin Eric and grandma Norma would love to read this…when you reach a big fat “Share” button with the Facebook logo on it sitting on the sidebar.

Click. Off you go into Facebook land, where you share the article, only to get distracted by uncle Denny’s commentary about his new granddaughter, and you’ve completely lost the vibe.

The same thing can easily happen on a squeeze page, sales letter, video content, or basically anything else you happen to be consuming. So how do you avoid the phenomenon? That depends on the answer to a simple question: what are you asking the surfer to do?

If you have a strong call-to-action that ends with a sale, subscription or other such consumer event, you put the share buttons on the other side of the interaction. You want them to buy more than you want them to share, so put the purchase in front of the buy.

If this particular piece of content ends with a link to another piece of content, and that content has the call-to-action on it, the logic changes. You don’t want to distract the customer from reaching your final call-to-action, so you put the sharing buttons on the top of the initial content — so that their focus stays on what they’re consuming, and when they reach the link, they click it. Again, the purpose is to make a sale, and those people who love your content enough to scroll back up to the top and click “share” are a bonus.

Of course, if the entire purpose is to generate a social buzz, you want the buttons on a floating bar that’s constantly visible no matter where along the content they are.

In short, social buttons are amazing for generating a buzz, but you don’t want the buzz to detract from your profit margins.

Custom Blog Creation: One Step In The Never Ending Story of Organic SEO

Custom blog creation is a staple of modern SEO, and for darn good reason — a blog has all kinds of good SEO going on.

Keywords
A properly set up blog can help you automatically target a few choice keywords even if you’re not SEO savvy enough to work them into your posts. By choosing categories, tags, and even usernames that are the very keywords you want to target, you make sure that those keywords show up a few times per page. If you are SEO savvy enough to toss them into your titles and opening paragraphs, you can redouble the effects — but even if you’re a complete SEO ignorant, a custom-built blog can go a long way toward getting your rankings up just because of it’s background mechanics.

Relevance
One thing that every backlink needs in order to boost your rankings is relevance. Because you create the content yourself, blogs are pretty much always relevant to the pages you link them to. You are blogging about business on your business blog and personal stuff on your personal blog, right? Then you’re pretty much good on the relevance front.

Link Structure
You’ve probably got more than one page that surfers could land on. Maybe you have a home page, an About Us page, and a Testimonials page. With your blog, you can link to each of those pages, and link to the more important pages more often. That’ll help Google decide which pages to direct traffic to. Furthermore, if you’re clever, you can help Google decide which pages on your site are relevant to which keywords by consistently linking, for example, “Custom Blog Creation” to the same page on your site — say, the one where you offer to custom-make blogs for your clients.

Freshness
Freshness — in other words, unique content that’s been created recently — is one of the things that Google loves more than anything else. It’s one of the core tenants of organic SEO: fresher content is better than stale. Blogs by their very nature insist that you produce fresh content by doing your blog posting on a regular basis, so you get freshness automatically alongside your keywords, relevance, and link structures.

Yep, blogs are pretty much going to be a part of the SEO game forever — better get back to posting yours!

SEO Never Stops: The Art of Long Term Blog Posting

When you start SEO, you should do it fully aware that you are necessarily in for the long haul. There’s no such thing as “a little bit of successful SEO”. You can have SEO in little bits, or you can have successful SEO, but not both, because SEO requires constant upkeep in order to keep your website on the top of the SERPs.

Enter your blog. If you’ve had your SEO company to a proper job of custom blog creation, your blog will have all manner of backlink-generating considerations built into it, and every post you make will be worth quite a bit when you pop that link back to your landing page. But if you let your habit of regular blog posting fall off, all of that SEO effort and expense is essentially wasted.

So how do you keep finding stuff to post about after the first 52 weekly posts? It’s a matter of switching things up while staying relevant.

• Try talking to another business owner in the same field and see what he thinks about the future of the market. Blog about his commentary.
• Focus on a specific and narrow part of your business process, whether it’s how you select your vendors or the importance of regularly organizing your widgets.
• Talk about a specific incident that occurred as a part of your normal business process. Redact the names, of course, but share your experience.
• If you’re really stuck, go back and find another post of yours that has gotten a lot of commentary and do an ‘update’ or a readdress of the same topic.
• You can even delve a little bit into your personal life as long as you can relate it back to your business.

The art of learning how to blog in the long term is of vital importance to any small business owner that doesn’t want to pay his SEO company to blog for him for the next several years. Get used to the idea now, and keep it up – anything less is a waste.

Why You Should Link Your Blog Posting to Facebook, Twitter, and More

Social networking — a lot of people are under the mistaken impression that it’s something primarily engaged in by seventeen year old girls on iPads. Just recently, however, a startling study revealed that the primary ‘customer’ of the social networking phenomenon is a mid-30s white middle-class white-collar worker. So what does that mean for your business?

Simple — it means that if you intend to appeal at all to the largest demographic in America, you should be involved in social networking. Fortunately, it’s easy — almost every single blogging engine out there offers social networking widgets that make it a snap to set up buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and lately Google Plus. You should use them. Every website, every blog posting, every piece of content you have your article writing and distribution team create should have social networking buttons featured prominently and above the fold.

In a lot of cases, it’s even automatic — if you post an article to EZineArticles.com, for example, your social buttons are front and center. If you need to have your blog hand-built by an expert in custom blog creation to make the social media buttons made equally clear and ubiquitous, do it. The reason why is simple: people love to share their opinion on stuff.

As long as your stuff really is good, their opinions should generally be positive — and that means your social media pages become like giant referrals. Other people searching for your business will see that you have twelve thousands Likes or what have you, and they’ll understand that that means you have a quality product.

All of this is particularly relevant to blog postings, because your business blog is the one place that your words and your brand are eternally and explicitly linked. Every blog post you make acts as a potential landing page for people who are being exposed to your brand for the first time, and if they like what they see, they’re likely to click that Like button before they do much else.

That’s a powerful step toward building a social following, which is on it’s way to becoming one of the most vital parts of modern marketing.

Social Bookmarking and Media: Just Bring Time

Social bookmarking, social buttons, social sharing, social media — the number of ways in which ‘social’ has become the new watchword in the online marketing environment is staggering. The prevalence of social buttons on every single blog posting, social bookmarking page, flash game, and business website in the entire world is such a given that even Google considers the buttons “top tier” content — there is no circumstance under which Google will penalize you for having them.

The thing about the social aspect of the Web lately is that it is designed from the ground up to rely on people who want to spend time being social. If you have a business that relies on social media for any part of your SEO, for example, you’re not going to be able to keep up unless you have a few very enthusiastic seventeen-year-old girls posting about you from their iPads.

That’s because social media, whether it’s Facebook or Reddit, takes a lot of time. More so even than traditional SEO efforts, which are already an enormous time-sink for the typical small business owner. SEO companies have entire cubicle farms devoted to social media experts who get paid to build followings on Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and the like. That’s basically all they do, every day, for different clients — and it still takes a team of 6 or 8 of them a month to really make their presence felt.

Just as importantly for a small business, that effort can’t be concentrated. You can have one superhuman employee work nonstop for a week and get the same results, because the passage of time is critical to the development of a social presence. That team of 6 or 8 can handle a dozen different clients in that month, because putting more than a couple of hours’ work each day results in rapidly diminishing returns.

That means that having one person on staff doing the job is a no-go. Either they’ll burn out because they can’t do the job of 6 people, or they’ll hit the point of diminishing returns and end up wasting effort and money doing a less effective job than the SEO team will.

In short: social bookmarking and other social media takes time, in more ways than one — time that you can hardly afford to spend yourself. Let the experts handle it for you.

Ultimate Conversions: Targeted Email Marketing From The Outside In

Targeted Email Marketing (TEM) is NOT typically part of the services offered by a website SEO company. That’s because it’s not actually SEO — there is nothing about TEM that will get your website ranked any higher for anything anywhere.

What TEM is, however, is a way of improving the effectiveness of any SEO you’ve already done. That’s because of a simple calculation:

Traffic * Conversion Rate = Sales

What that means is that if you have 200 visitors, and you convert 3% of them, you’ve just made 6 sales. You can improve your number of sales by getting more traffic, or you can do it by improving your conversion rate. SEO is designed to get you more traffic — but at some point, you’ll make more money by improving your conversion rate than you will by adding another 4 or 5 visitors per day.

So, Targeted Email Marketing. Have you ever seen a website that offers you something for free, but asks you to put in your name and Email address in order to get it? That’s TEM in action. If you’ve ever done this, you know that the next step is to receive an Email that says “hey, is it cool that you continue to receive Email from this website?”, and you have to say “yes” in order to get the free thing.

What you’ve just done is confirm via Email that any further Emails the webmaster of that site sends you aren’t spam and you accept his right to send them to you. From his perspective, he now has a ‘hook’ in you. He can send you an Email whenever he has a new sale, a new product, or even just because he wants to impress you with how knowledgeable and competent he is in his field.

As you can imagine, it’s a killer way to turn visitors into buyers, because you can remind them of your product and your offer every week…forever! You can keep trying different angles until you find one that sticks. Every time you throw an Email out to your TEM list, you get a bunch of them back on your website for another chance at that 3% conversion rate.

That’s the kind of tool that SEO companies typically overlook because they’re focused on traffic, but if you find an SEO company that offers TEM as a service, you know you’ve got someone who is focused on improving your profits from every possible angle — a great find.

Social Bookmarking Is a Sucker’s Game — Isn’t It?

There’s been a lot of changes to the social bookmarking game in the past few years. Even as far back as Google’s addition of the nofollow tag, social bookmarking pages have been declared ‘dead’ over and over again by various SEO gurus. Yet somehow, it keeps coming back like a zombie in a B-grade horror movie. The fact is that social bookmarking might not be the utterly amazing backlink that it was when Digg and del.ici.ous first invented the term, but they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

The reasons why are several, but the big ones are very big.

Control
A social bookmark gives you control over two things that are very important: the context around your link (what many organic SEO experts like to call “Latent Semantic Indexing” or “LSI”), and the actual anchor text of the link itself. Every time you get a link to your site, Google looks at the anchor text and the LSI to determine how relevant the linking page is to your website, and modified the link’s strength based on the relevance. That makes controllable links much stronger than uncontrollable ones.

Persistence
There’s nothing like investing a few thousand dollars in a massive and complex link building campaign and then discovering six months later than half of the sites you linked from have either disappeared or at least eliminated your links. That’s a lot of money and time down the drain. Mercifully, social bookmarking sites don’t do that. They are persistent, which means every well-controlled link you build on a social bookmarking site is here to stay.

Panda
Yes, I said Panda. Panda is the latest Google toy, and it’s designed to make sites more ‘user-friendly’. One of the things that the Goog decided when they built Panda was that social bookmarking buttons are totally cool to have featured prominently on a website (as opposed to, say, AdWords blocks or banner ads.) That means that, as the Web adapts to the latest twist Google has for us, social bookmarking is only going to get more and more used, which means social bookmarks will get more authority. What more do you need to know?