I recently gave a presentation called “Blogging 101 – An Introduction to Blogs and Web 2.0″ to a Seattle business organization called The Alternative Board. You can view the slide show below. The presentation addresses the following questions and topics:
What is a blog? Why are blogs so popular? How is a blog different from a website? Why businesses love blogs. How blogs are being used today. Why blogs are part of Web 2.0. Why a blog is a prime example of a Web 2.0 tool.
What is Web 2.0? What does Web 2.0 mean to your business? Blogs as marketing tools. In addition to blogs, what are the other parts of a successful online marketing strategy? What should you consider before investing your time and money in a blog?
Examples of a typical (WordPress) blog administration interface. Free blog hosts versus paid third-party blog hosting. Steps in successful blog implementation.
The length and content of the presentation can be tailored to the needs of any group. If you are interested in having me present, give me a call: (206) 962-9119 or email using the link under the address above.
This is the first in a series of McBuzz Blog SEO tips. It includes a short video (below). The post and the video show how to use keywords in your blog so that people can find you in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live Search. If you only have time to do a few things to optimize blog posts, do these first! (SEO, as you probably know, stands for “search engine optimization”.)
Before you can put keywords anywhere, you have to decide which ones to use. An essential part of the SEO process is choosing the best keywords. How to do that is a topic I will address in a separate post. For now, let’s think of it like this:
To choose a good keyword, answer two questions:
1. What is my post about?
2. How would someone search for this information? In other words, what would they put in the search box? That’s a keyword.
Here’s the catch: if people aren’t using the same words you use to talk about your products or services, they won’t find you. To some, this may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s not obvious, especially not to people who use particular terms to talk about their products or services.
One example: I’m working with a client whose website sells stylish, well-designed baby clothing that acts like a baby bib. She calls it “performance baby wear”. It’s a perfect characterization, because it brands the clothing as high-end so it can be sold at an appropriate price, which is more than one would pay for a standard baby bib. The problem: no one searches for “performance baby wear”. People search for “baby bibs”.
For now, let’s assume you have picked the best keyword, or at least a good one. I’m calling this the “primary” keyword. It’s the topic of your post. Here’s what to do with it.
I’ll use my own post as an example. The title is “Blog SEO Tip #1: Where to Put Keywords”. The keyword here is “blog seo“. I put it at the beginning of my title, and I put it in the first paragraph. And (bonus tip) I used “initial caps” in my title, that is, I captialized the first letter of each word.
Does the keyword have to go at the beginning of your title? No. But it’s a good idea for a number of reasons.
Here’s where the built-in SEO features of blogging software like WordPress come in. WordPress automatically does the following with your post title:
1. It creates the page title (one of the most important places search engines look to see what a web page is about), and
2. It creates the page URL (assuming you have the “permalinks” feature turned on*).
Both of these are vital to good SEO, especially the page title. A keyword is most effective when it’s at the beginning of a page title.
THE PAGE TITLE
THE PAGE URL
BLOG SEO HAS OTHER, NON-SEO BENEFITS
Here’s another reason to put the keyword at the beginning of your title: RSS feeds are used more and more to display blog post titles in desktop widgets and on web pages. See titles of recent blog posts at Alltop Social Media for one example. If your post title is long, it may be cut off.
By putting the keyword or keywords at the beginning of the title, you ensure that the main topic of the post will be seen. What if I had titled my post “Here’s something I really want to tell you about blog SEO”. How much would that tell you about the post if you weren’t able to see the word “SEO”! Not much at all, which means fewer clicks.
Same goes for putting the keyword in the first paragraph. By doing so, you make the topic of your post obvious. Lots of feed readers and widgets on computer desktops display previews of blog posts consisting of the title and first paragraph. If you don’t get to the point of your post until the second or third paragraph, no one will see it unless they click to read the whole post. If you want to find new readers, you need to grab their attention when you have the chance.
Start putting your keyword at, or near, the beginning of your blog post titles, and in the first paragraph, today. Your posts are sure to rank higher for your keyword than they would have otherwise.
*Permalinks or “pretty permalinks” are URLs in plain English, as opposed to URLs made of strings of incomprehensible letters, numbers and other characters.
URLs in plain English that contain keywords are better for SEO.
BLOG SEO TIP #1: THE MOVIE! This is my first run at putting a blog post into a video. There’s still plenty of room for improvement! Let me know what you think. (Better recording equipment coming soon – with better screen shots.)
Delicious bookmarks are an easy and effective way to promote your business. They’re a great example of a Web 2.0 social media tool that can be used to share valuable information and insight, while at the same time establishing yourself as a resource in your field and building your brand.
In our Twitter seminar in Seattle last night, Web 2.0 Media Group colleague Wayne Bishop and I talked about identifying tools that you can learn to use quickly, and that bring a good return on your investment of time and effort. Many social media tools are free or low cost, so obviously it’s the time and engergy required to get up to speed and put them to use that you have to weigh when deciding which ones to use.
We also stressed the importance of understanding the audience you want to reach before jumping on any Web 2.0 technology bandwagon. If your ideal customers don’t use Twitter, then it may not work for you as a marketing tool. But if the articles, blogs or reviews your ideal customers read online are written by Twitter users, Twitter may well be a good place to spend some time – at least to see what those influential writers are talking about.
Deliciousis an example of a Web 2.0 technology that has value for you as you use it, and it has additional value for those you share it with. Setting up an account is fairly simple. http://delicious.com/ Send me a comment below if you need help.
Be sure to use an effective username, like your name as one word in lower case, or the name of your business.
Here are two accounts I’m using. Wayne Bishop and I share access to the second account, so we can both put bookmarks there, and we use these bookmarks for the seminars we offer: http://delicious.com/mcbuzz
You can connect one account to another by adding a user to your Network. I have added web20mediagroup to the mcbuzz Network so that anytime I save a bookmark to the mcbuzz account, I can send it to the web20mediagroup account, as well.
Anyone can visit your bookmarks online unless you mark them as “Do not share”. To share your bookmarks, just send someone a link for your account like the links above. And, you can do all sorts of other cool stuff with your bookmarks, or a particular subset of your bookmarks. You create subsets of your bookmarks by assigning tagsto them.
One example: put your Delicious bookmarks into a sidebar on your blog or website. In WordPress, this is really easy to do using a sidebar widget. To see how to use WordPress widgets, check out these Business Blogging 101 tutorials:
There is a WordPress widget for Delicious that you can use to put bookmarks into a sidebar just like you see here on the Web 2.0 Media Group website (in the right sidebar – scroll down a bit to see them).
Since you are probably already creating bookmarks for yourself, why not put them on Delicious where you can share them with others and show people the kind of reading you are doing and what you think is important. And when you want to bookmark that Shopping Channel Jewelry Specials page, just be sure to click the “Do not share” box!
