Blogging Tip #3 - Break up that thought
December 8th, 2006Blogging Tip #3
When you are posting to your blog, if your post has a number of headings, then you might look at breaking it out into a more than one posts. This has an advantage in that you will be able to create more ’site pages’ on your blog but also the search engines will have a better chance of indexing the page for the right topic.
Say for example, you are writing about a local restaurant called ‘The Blues Club’, you give a description, and directions. Then you want to write about a band that is playing at the club. Start a new post for the band, give a bio and mention that they are playing the Blues Club and then link back to the previous post. This gives you two chances to mention the club and an extra chance than if you had made one post with all the info, to show in the search engines for ‘Your Town & Blues Club’ search term.
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Blogging Tip #2 - Break up text into smaller paragraphs
November 29th, 2006Blogging Tip #2
When adding text to your blog, break it up into short parargraphs to make it easier to read online. In a printed document it is easy to read large blocks of text, while online people can get lost more easily and end up leaving the page because it is too much eye strain.
Online people tend to ’scan’ read so by breaking text into smaller sections you make it easy to scan.
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Blogging Tip #1 - Write to your blog regularly
November 18th, 2006Blogging Tip #1
When people get a new blog they are all excited and ready to roll. They go at it will gusto and then crash and burn about a month later. Or they get the training and then just never find the time to work on it again until weeks later and can not remember where to even start.
If you are using a blog to promote your business then add an engaement to your calender to blog on a regular basis. Two to three times a week would be great, if you cannot manage that, then at least once a week is the minimum.
Readers will not come back if they never see new content, saying that though, you do not want to burn out on blogging. So try to keep up with posting and if you do not have much to add, or do not have much time, maybe try a adding a photo or talk about another local business. There is lots to say when you are spreading the word and networking.
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Blogging Best Practices with Internet Guru Dave Taylor
September 13th, 2006This video is just a little more than 1 hour long but Dave Taylor gives you a wealth of information on blogging and why a blog can help enhance your website.
Napa Valley Bed and Breakfast Manage Recipe Section with a Blog.
September 5th, 2006Bring More Traffic to Your Website with a Blog
July 20th, 2006A recent article from SEOMoz that covers 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic gives blogs and blogging high marks. They talk about a successful blog being the biggest marketing tool you can use to help bring more traffic to your website.
A good point they make is that in order to help bring traffic to your blog you can add comments on other blogs with a link back to your own site. By adding comments on other blogs you can help bring traffic to your own blog because people reading blog A will want to know the rest of your commentary and come over to your blog to see what you might have to say about the subject in addition to Blogger A.
Invisible Marketing with Web 2.0
July 7th, 2006
In this pdf white paper Marqui brings together ideas about the changes that are in the works with Web 2.0. It talks about how a shift has taken place in the online world and how people are requesting information they are looking for rather than passively waiting for the information to come to them.
We can see this trend in all walks of life, newspaper readership has decreased as has the number of people watching TV. Many people today proactively research information online from their peers and from those that have ‘insider’ information and from sites that offer the ability to communicate with the creators. The use of feeds to request content be sent to desktops has increased with the ability to create your own search page in Google and personal pages in Yahoo and MSN.
No more so do we see this than in the blog world. Many more companies are reaching their audience with the use of blogs. Company blogs are becoming the number one referrer to a company website. Marqui talks about this and it is echoed in our own site at BlizzardInternet.com where the amount of traffic coming to and from the Newsletter blog has grown in leaps and bounds.
To read the full article, download the pdf file
Does a Blog Make Sense for your Business?
June 8th, 2006A blog might make sense for your business if you:
- Are already doing PPC, SEO and e-mail marketing
- Have the energy and commitment to produce content daily or a few times per week - regular updates are critical to receiving the full search engine benefits of blogging
- Intend to create buzz marketing or enhance branding
- Hold knowledge and passion about a specific topic of interest to potential clients
- Want to bring return visitors to your web site; once accustomed to your blog, people will visit it often for updated information
- Plan to provide increasing amounts of content to your web site visitors
Known Benefits of a Blog
June 6th, 2006Improve Your Web Site’s Performance with a Blog
- Search engines frequent blogs because they are updated often - search engines reward all of this original content and visit the site often
- The public can comment on posts, which creates content naturally - the way search engines want to see it
- Visitors enjoy using blogs because the information is fresh
- Blogs provide an easy way to add information to a site
- Public comments can be moderated/edited
- Additional relevant content from a blog helps the site it’s connected to rank higher for more of your important keyword phrases
- Visitors return to the site often to check out what is new
- A blog is a great way to target a niche by offering content of interest to the group
So, What is a Blog?
April 20th, 2006A traditional blog is chatty and opinionated. It is the thoughts and musings of the author. Some blogs can be pretty personal, like a personal journey though an illness, or a day-by-day blow of a trip. Some are political as these 2004 Election Blogs and others are just ramblings. But they all have a couple of things in common. They are formatted in a diary like way; one post after the other by date and each post is then archive in a category for future reference and reading.
A blog can be as open or private as the author wishes. The admin of a blog can open it up for comments on some, all or no posts. They can choose to have the post closed to all comments. They can link to other blogs via Trackbacks. Or can make the blog private, locked away so only those with the correct password can read them - just like an old diary. Blogs can have all kinds of information on them that the author has added. For example; a recommended book list or a list of recommended sites to visit etc.
Once a post is made the search engines are notified of new content on the site, via ‘ping’ which helps the blog in search ranking because the spiders come out more often, each time they are ‘pinge’ to indeax the new content.
To view other blogs take a look at these popular blog search engines:
