How to Blog for Maximum SEO Benefit

Valuable and unique content is a critical element for SEO success.  Putting together a targeted blog plan now can help you be at the top of the natural search results in the upcoming holiday season.

1) Keyword Research

It’s common to think about keywords for Pay-Per-Click Advertising and SEO, but keywords are often an afterthought when it comes to blogging.  In order for blogging to achieve SEO success, it is vital to start with a keyword strategy.

Start by thinking about the products that you want in the lead for traffic and sales in the upcoming holiday.  We’ll use an example of a retailer who sells grill accessories: Grill Mitts, Grill Lights.

The next step is to generate a list of keywords for how people are going to be gift shopping for these items.  Whom will they be looking for gift ideas for?   What type of person is it for?  What problem does it solve?   If you get stuck you can always check out question sites, or read reviews on product pages to get ideas for the most favorite uses and solved needs.  Continuing on our example: Gifts for dad, Gifts for grill man, Grilling accessory gifts, Gifts for men who love to entertain, Lighting up grill space, Handling hot grill pans.

For other great ideas on generating keywords, check out the keyword tools list here: .

2) Blog Plan

The next step is to create a plan around blogging for sufficient coverage and awareness.  Your blog plan should include:

How will you provide sufficient coverage for each keyword? We recommend 2-5 blog posts for each of the keywords that you identified in the first step.  You can use different format and content approaches for each such as lists, guides, how-to’s, humorous slants, or consolidated summaries of all the reviews available.

How frequently you should blog? You can back into this answer by the volume of keywords and the number of posts necessary to cover the keywords.  We find that blogging a minimum once per day is a good start.

Who will be writing the blogs? Get everyone at the company involved, or try outsourcing if you can’t meet the demands internally.  There are some interesting outsourcing options out there such as TextBroker.

How will you promote the blog posts? After you’ve spent the time putting together your amazing blog content, it’s important to get the word out. Some options include:

• Push blog entries via social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
• Push your blog articles to social bookmarking sites such as Digg.
• Syndicate your articles to other related industry sites.
• Post your blog entry to relevant questions on answer sites such as Yahoo Answers and Google Groups.
• Comment on other related blog posts with a link back to your blog.
• List your content on Craigslist with the relevant product.
• Run a long-tail pay per click campaign.
• Include links to blog posts in the Site Links of your other PPC campaigns.
• Make your blog posts easily sharable and encourage people to share.
• Include coupon codes or discount offers in your blog posts to encourage sharing.

How will you keep your blog content fresh? Allow others to comment on your posts and you can also add updates to the blog article based on feedback received or new information.

3) Blog Content Optimization for SEO

The content on the blog article itself will need to be constructed in such a way that it yields you the best possible SEO results:

Blog Title. Include your target keywords into the title of the blog post.

Blog Tags. Use keywords as tags for your blog post entry.

Blog Post URL. Include your keywords in the URL itself.  Make sure to separate the words using dashes.

Blog Images. Optimize the names of any images used within your blog post with variations of your keywords.  Separate your keywords by dashes within the image name.

Blog Content.  Use secondary keywords and variations of target keywords throughout your content in a natural way.

Internal Linking. Inside your blog posts, link to previous related blog posts and product pages.  From within your website, links to your blog posts from relevant product pages, or product category pages.  Be sure that all anchor text includes keywords.

Link Building. Beyond internal links, you’ll want to get external links to your blog post.  One of the easiest things you can do here is to link out to other partner-type sites and complementary bloggers – and make sure they know about it.

Holiday shopping research will soon be in full swing, so now is the time to be getting your blog plan into place and actively producing and promoting your exceptional content for the best possible natural search traffic.

Improve Your Page Rank on Search Engines

Maintaining and updating a small business website can often become a huge headache for business owners. Many small business owners start by outsourcing the creation of a website, which is then hosted on a service that may or may not be the host for the e-commerce site.

After the site is live and inevitable changes are required, making those changes typically involves re-engaging the contractor to do the updates. Because small business owners often defer updates to their sites in order to bundle as many changes as possible into a single work order, websites can quickly get out of date and begin to fall down in the rankings of natural (or organic) search engine results.  And keeping your website as high as possible in natural search results — called search engine optimization or SEO — should be a top priority.

What’s a small business owner to do? A great low cost way of creating a website that you – yes, even you – can maintain over time is to either host your site on a blog platform like WordPress or download WordPress to a site host (such as Rackspace or Amazon Web Services, for instance).  Six Apart and a few other providers also offers a range of blogging platform options.

Our website – which is separate from but linked to our Yield Web Marketing Suite application – is built on WordPress. Even big companies use this platform for very high-end sites, like this one built by Maybelline.

There are several benefits to publishing your website to a blog platform:

First: Low overall cost
Second: Huge array of pre-designed, low cost or free site layout templates to choose from
Third: Easy to edit and update yourself
Fourth: Sites published on blog platforms are easier to index, which is great for SEO

In addition to the pre-designed site layout templates that are available to you, there are a growing number of low-cost design firms, like Graphics.net, who can create something custom for you that looks great and meets your exact needs. Once they’ve published your custom-designed site to WordPress, you then have the complete power to make changes to the content or media whenever you’d like.

This also enables you to fully integrate your blog with your website. Many small businesses will have their main site under one URL structure, but host their blog under another, which does nothing to help your business with SEO.  And because it’s likely you’ll update your blog more frequently than your website, you can constantly work to integrate your keyword lists with your blog posts and keep your whole website high in natural search rankings.

Small plug: one of the great features of our Yield Web Marketing Suite is our site optimization component.  It will do a full assessment of your website (with new assessments recurring regularly as long you subscribe) to evaluate it against our library of SEO best practices.  After each assessment, you’re provided with a full listing of issues you need to address throughout your website in order to help improve your page rank on the the major search engines, including very clear instructions on how to fix each problem. In many instances, our system offers “auto-fixes” to solve the problem for you.

Websites are a given – every small business knows they need one. But creating and maintaining one on your own – or with the one-time support of a low-cost vendor – doesn’t have to be difficult or super expensive.  At the end of the day, you do need a website that works as hard for you as you do, and is delivering the traffic you need to move your business forward.  By building and maintaining a website that is constantly updating and converges sensibly with your keyword lists, you’ll stay as high as possible in natural (and therefore free) search rankings while improving the traffic that comes from clicks on those links.

For other blog posts in this series go here.

For information about how our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help your existing website to rank higher in natural search engine results, go here.

Batten Down the Hatches

In these days of economic challenge, all businesses have their share of problems.  Small businesses, however, can hope to weather the storm precisely because of size, which often means lower overhead and a high ability to adapt to change.

A big portion of the folks we serve at Yield Software run small and growing businesses.  As a result, we see a lot of really smart, nimble and strategic companies in action.  So I thought it would be helpful to take what we’ve learned watching our own customers in action and share that with you – you know, a “rising tide lifts all ships” kind of thing.

Ten Low-cost / High-impact Marketing Strategies for Small Business

Strategy One: Publish your website on a blog platform like WordPress.  There are several benefits to publishing your website on a blog platform:

1. Low overall cost

2. Huge array of pre-designed, low cost or free site layout templates to choose from

3. Easy to edit and update yourself

Search engines almost always find sites hosted on blog platforms easier to index, which is great for natural search optimization (SEO).  In addition to the pre-designed site layout templates that are available to you, there are a growing number of low-cost design firms, like Graphics.net, who can create something custom for you that looks great and meets your exact needs.

Strategy Two: Blog!  For people who don’t blog – or who don’t even like to write – the idea of starting and maintaining a blog can feel daunting.  But it doesn’t have to be.  Especially if your website is already hosted on a blog platform.  All you need to do is dash off a few sentences each day about thoughts or issues pertaining to the goods and services you sell; or the unique way you do business; or something wonderful one of your employees did; or a great story about an existing customer.  Sometimes, you’ll write something that you think is super important, and folks ignore it.  Other times, you might write something that is light-hearted and EVERYONE shows up to read it.  You just never know what might capture people’s attention.  The point is: just do it.

There are a couple of great business benefits to blogging:

First, It’s great for SEO.  Search engines will “crawl” your site more often if they realize it’s constantly updating.  Also, blog posts give other bloggers a reason to link you.  If you say something another blogger thinks is interesting or important, they’ll link to you – it’s called link love and search engines look for those kinds of things to determine how high your site should rank in their natural search results.

Second, Blogging makes your business feel more “human”.  As people visit your site and consider your competitors, the fact that they are able to connect with you – a real person – through your blog could be the thing that wins them over.  When customers develop an emotional connection to your business, no matter how small, that’s powerful.

Strategy Three: Set up and regularly distribute an email newsletter.  Using low cost or free newsletter services such as Constant Contact is a great way for you to stay in touch with both prospects and existing customers.  Be sure to give visitors to your site a visible and easy way to sign up for your newsletter – newsletters are most successful when folks voluntarily opt-in to receive them.  Sending newsletters to folks who don’t ask for them not only irritates them, it could be breaking the Federal Can-Spam Act, or other laws or regulations.

Take a look at newsletters others put out so you can get a sense of what works and what doesn’t from your own point of view.  For instance, I’m constantly inspired by the newsletters I get from MediaPost.  They don’t have to be overly fancy in terms of design or layout, and Constant Contact offers a bunch of easy ways to give your newsletter a personal touch.  Then, try sending a newsletter out every two weeks or so.  They don’t require a lot of writing, and you can certainly repurpose content from your blog, or point to other sources of content you find interesting or useful.  And, of course, you should also highlight any special promotions or special offers you have.

The bottom line?  The bottom line.  Newsletters are a great way to drive traffic back to your site and to get at new or increased sales.

Strategy Four:  Test a pay-per-click (PPC) customer acquisition campaign.  I know – the minute an acronym shows up, you want to run for the hills.  But PPC campaigns can be a low-cost, high-return way for you to attract qualified new prospects to your website.  You’ll need to do a few things like understand your budgets, pull your keyword lists together and think about how to write your ad copy, but if you use a service like our Yield Web Marketing Suite to do the heavy lifting, it doesn’t have to be hard.  Starting with a relatively small budget, you can dip your toes into the waters called search engine marketing (SEM) to see what kinds of results are possible for you.

Small pitch: Because search is most often based on intention – that is, people type words into a search box in order to find something they want or need – it’s in your best interest be at the top of the results list for searches relating to your business.  The best way to do this is to get into the Sponsored Links section on the top and right-hand side of results pages.  Another great way is through SEO, which helps you get as high as possible in natural (or organic) search results.  Our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you on both these measures for a very low monthly cost – and we offer a free thirty-day trial with no obligation. (Okay: the small pitch is done!)

The benefits of SEM include, among many other things, excellent tracking so you’re able to determine the ROI for each dollar you spend; highly qualified leads whose intentions match that which you offer; and a low cost of acquisition relative to other marketing programs.

Strategy Five: Organize a series of informational Webinars.  Admittedly, planning and producing webinars comes easier to some than others.  But this “high touch” marketing strategy can produce whole lists of very qualified leads for your small business.  There are a number of low-cost, powerful webinar services including Cisco’s WebEx and GoToMeeting.  And both have step-by-step guides on how to plan for and execute webinars.  Also, while the business owner is always the host, often a good strategy is to feature subject matter experts who don’t work at your company.  Why?

Typically, webinars are not specifically about your goods or services, but about issues that pertain to your offerings.  You see, people will often avoid a webinar that seems like just a commercial about your business, but they’ll eagerly attend something that helps them to learn or grow in some substantive way.  Once they’ve gotten the value of growth from you, they’re likely happy to hear about how their new-found knowledge pertains to your company.

Strategy Six: Use social networks.  You may have avoided these up until now, but it’s time to face the truth: more and more adults are moving onto social networks, especially Facebook and LinkedIn.  As folks continue to find value in and benefit from these growing forms of communality, opting to stand on the outside can have real downsides for business owners.  For starters, if you are connected with friends, family, business associates and customers through one or more social networks, just think about how efficient it is to let them all know you have a new blog post; or an upcoming webinar; or just sent out a fresh newsletter; or to let folks know what excites you about your own business.

Social networks are also a wonderful way of conducting a kind of market research: you get a front row view into what people are paying attention to; what’s catching on and what’s falling flat; and the emerging trends that may presage a big business opportunity for you.

Some business owners prefer to keep their personal social networks separate from their professional social networks.  While I don’t do this myself, I can see why others would.  And this is very easy to do, though it may require just a little more coordination on your part.  At the end of the day, it’s important to think about the word-of-mouth potential inherent in all social networks and the ways in which these tools enable you to establish a more personal or emotional bond with all those you serve – and seek to serve.

Strategy Seven: Use Twitter.  If you’ve been reluctant to use social networks, you’ve likely been very reluctant to use Twitter.  (Don’t worry: you’re still a good person!)  But there is now a growing consensus that indicates Twitter is an extraordinarily important method for staying connected in a casual, simple way with a wide community of people.  If you’re not using Twitter already, sign up and start by being a passive observer.  As you start to follow folks (for instance, join a bunch of the folks following us at Twitter.com/YieldSW), you’ll begin to see how people use Twitter to communicate and stay connected.  When you’re comfortable, start adding your own “tweets” to the Twitter stream.

A few things to remember:

First, Since this Twitter account will be for your business, choose a username that relates to your business.  For instance, the guy who built the wildly successful news and information site Mashable.com uses “Mashable” as his user name on Twitter and all of his other social media accounts.  This makes it easier for folks to find him. (At Yield Software, we use YieldSW everywhere.)

Second, Pick an avatar (or image) that works for your business.  It could be a head shot of you as the business owner (as in the case of Mashable) or it could be your logo (which is what we do at Yield).  There may be some other image that is appropriate.  Whatever you do: be consistent. Use the same image everywhere one is required.

Third, Don’t just pitch your business or your products.  Twitter is more about real communication, not formal marketing communications.  You should tweet about your business, of course, but do it by directing folks to a new blog post, for instance, or by pointing out a customer success.  And you should also include personal updates or points-of-view.  But remember: this is a mass communication medium.  Once you hit that “enter” button, you’ve just published something to the world you can’t take back!

Strategy Eight: Use “real people” testimonials and their photos.  Another great way to establish an emotional bond with prospects visiting your site is through authentic testimonials by your customers.  It’s so important that these are written in a warm, authentic voice and don’t sound like a PR person wrote it for client approval.  And you should use a photo of the person making the testimonial that is in the work place or in a social situation – anything but a formal business portrait.

As the world changes, people are increasingly looking for more genuine forms of interaction and communications.  And because the Internet makes this possible on a global scale, people also expect it.

Over and over again, studies show that people are more likely to trust someone they know rather than someone who appears to be in a position of authority.  So, to the degree that you can show testimonials and photos that people can relate to – that don’t look and sound and feel “authoritative” – the more successful such endorsements will be.  Testimonials have always been a powerful way to close new business, so the only thing that’s different now is the way in which they’re delivered.

Stay real. Stay authentic. Stay warm.  Your testimonials will work a whole lot harder for you if you do.

Strategy Nine: Set up a YouTube Channel.  One of the reasons the TV show “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and its’ predecessors have always been such reliable hits is because humans seem to be born with a strong voyeuristic streak in them.  It’s fun to peak inside of something you might otherwise feel on the outside of.

Which is why, among many other reasons, YouTube has been such a runaway train success.

For businesses, deciding to have a YouTube presence doesn’t have to mean you have to expose pratfalls or embarrassing mistakes in order to have a presence on the ubiquitous site, but it does mean you have to have a strategy for using it that makes sense given the context.  Many businesses and organizations will produce professional TV-like commercials that they publish only on YouTube.  These often will push boundaries and take chances they would never attempt on national TV.  They can also be part of larger “viral” campaign where the objective is to make something so wildly popular in a grassroots way, it spreads all over the planet through sheer people power.

Others use it more soberly.  For instance, the organization TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) will periodically post videos that include real substance about compelling issues of the day.  President Barack Obama has a YouTube channel where the traditional (and now outmoded) Saturday morning Presidential radio address now resides.

Anyone can make videos.  Even you.  Small business owners, in fact, often do so with the help of their kids.  Videotape one of your webinars, for instance; or a trip to source new products to sell on your site; or the manufacturing process for your cool, totally unique little widget.  You can then feature the videos in your channel, on your blog and throughout your website.

With quality video recording equipment getting less and less expensive by the day, and with the availability of high-quality, low cost editing software, video production is now a DIY endeavor.  (Buy a Apple Macintosh computer, for instance, and it comes bundled with iMovie, which is a nearly professional, yet easy-to-use video editing software included in the price of the purchase.)

Strategy Ten: Cool Business Cards.  I know, I know: this sounds a little silly.  But there’s a larger point here, which is to use every means at your disposal to differentiate your business from the competition.  Find ways to stand out.  For instance, you probably already distribute your business card far and wide, so why not make a statement with it.

The folks at MooCards are integrated with photo sharing services like Flickr, which enables you to order very cool cards with unique images on the backs from your Flickr stream.  They have the standard size for business cards, but they also have this smaller size that never fails to capture people’s attention.  First, they check out the small card, then see the very cool image on the backside and finally conclude: cool.  You can use photography for your images, your children’s art, or photography from your catalog of goods and services – be creative and do something that works for your small business.  It will get people’s attention and they’ll definitely talk about you (and about how cool you are.) The best part: they’re very affordable.

I hope this list of ideas is helpful to you as you work to move the needle for your business in these tough economic times.  With a little tenacity and focus, and with a few good marketing strategies on your side, you’re going to do just great!