Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

There has been a lot of talk about Blogging and SEO and how they work together lately. Some research shows that business blogging is on the decline, while many are turning to social media for their marketing. Other people are very wound up about the latest Google update and how it is going to hurt your search rankings. I thought we would talk about both and some SEO and blogging best practices along the way.

Social Media vs. Your Business Blog

There has been a lot of talk about business blogging declining and companies turning to social media instead. Let’s look at a couple blogging pros and cons that could have to do with this switch.

BLOGGING CON: Blogging generally takes more time than social media alone – One reason businesses could be making the switch is that blogging does take up a lot of time. Writing posts regularly can be challenging and takes a fair amount of resources.

BLOGGING PRO: Your social media content does not belong to you – Say you spend hundreds of hours creating your Facebook content and building ‘likes’ and engagement. Now what if Facebook goes down the tubes in 2013? The company is going public, the CEO just turned 28 this week and many people think Facebook is just a fad – anything could happen. Your content and ‘likes’ on Facebook belong to Facebook, not to your business. Now a blog and your email marketing list… that is content and contacts that belong to you no matter what the newest craze is.

BLOGGING CON: Social Media is cheap – Updating your social media profiles is quick work. A blog takes a greater investment from your organization.

BLOGGING PRO: Blogs are great for SEO – With each post you create, you are giving search engines what they crave… content. Also, with the frequency of new content, you give search engines reasons to keep coming back to your site to index content. Search engines do not index most social media content.

I am a big social media fan. I think it is a great opportunity for many businesses to reach new customers, engage current customers and get more people talking about their businesses. I think social media works best in conjunction with your blog and other marketing efforts. Your social media followers need a destination to go back to. Sending them to your site is a better option than to a news source, competitor or another website.

The new Google update will kill your search rankings!!! Pandas and Penguins… oh my!

In the last weeks of April, Google confirmed that they rolled out three algorithm changes. First there was the Panda Updates 3.5 and 3.6. These updates, as with all algorithm updates are to hopefully make your search results better. These latest updates are said to really be trying to track down low quality content and make sure it isn’t beating out good, quality content. Then there was the Penguin update (hey, I don’t name these things) that is trying to target websites that are attempting to spam the Google algorithm.

We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the over 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year. – A Google Spokesperson

All this change making you nervous? Are people telling you that your website is going to suffer?

Your website may be penalized under the new updates if:

• You are keyword stuffing your site content
• You participate in link schemes to get other websites (not related to you or your industry) to link to you in hopes of ranking better
• You use cloaking (showing one thing to users and hiding other content in your HTML)
• You use sneaky javascript redirects to also display something different to users and site crawlers
• You deliberately created duplicate content across domains to try to deceive search engines
• You are using automatic aggregators to create most of the content on your site
• You have a heavily templated website that is hard for search engines to crawl the content of

Sooooo pretty much all of those points listed above are the same things Google has been fighting for years and years. There isn’t a lot here that should worry the common business that is already using basic SEO best practices.

So what SHOULD you be doing for good SEO on your blog?

In this time of social media and search algorithm updates, what SHOULD you be doing to ensure good SEO on your blog?

1. Create good quality content that people will find useful – This is probably the biggest thing you can do for your blog. Write good posts that people value. Once you do that, the rest will come organically. People will find it, link to it and talk about it. Search engines will see people like it, they stay on the page, they talk about it and link to it and then they will rank it even better.
2. Make sure your blog is hosted on your website domain – Blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger are great but you want your blog content ON your website and not competing with it. You do not want your blog to be www.abccompany.wordpress.com, instead you want it to be www.abccompany.com/blog.
3. Use categories and tags to organize your content – Create categories and tags for your posts that are industry related keywords. Tag posts appropriately to help organize your content for search engines and for your readers.
4. Optimize for people – Paying attention to keywords is great but write for your readers, not for search engines. Search engines really weigh their rankings on how readers use your content. If your readers are turned off by keyword stuffing and complex articles, search engines will be turned off too.
5. Use Google Analytics to see what is working and what isn’t – Review your inbound traffic and popular content in Analytics regularly. Write more of what people seem to like and analyze what didn’t get off the ground. Sometimes a ‘bad’ blog post isn’t bad at all… it may have just had a poor title or was organized oddly for your readers.
6. Link in AND link out – When you are writing blog posts you should link to other posts people may want to reference on your site for more information. You also want to be sure to link out to other blogs and sources too.
7. Use social media to promote your blog – Blogs were meant to be shared! Add social sharing to your company blog and be sure to share your newest (and oldest) posts on your social media profiles.

So the Spring 2012 version of good SEO for your blog is… keep doing more of the same. Search algorithms are always changing while they try to get better. Unless you are trying to scam the system, you shouldn’t get caught up in the hype. Social media seems to be here to stay. Many businesses are seeing great success from it but it can’t replace blogging or your website. Use new tools to help you amplify your staple marketing efforts. Always keep an eye on what is working and what is not for your businesses. Don’t let a report or article or guru lead you down the wrong path. SEO for your blog really hasn’t changed. Write good valuable content and the rest should fall into place!

Photo credit: smerikal and zidane_0120

We have Facebook on the brain over here this week. Between some projects we are working on and my webinar on Facebook Business Pages, Zuckerburg has our attention. This morning we were talking about some of the new features people are getting more comfortable with in the new Pages layout. One aspect I am starting to see some traction with is the pinning and highlighting of posts.

Highlighting a Facebook post

When you post something to your business page you have the option to Highlight it by clicking on the star just above the post. Highlighting will take your post and double the width of it so it takes up the whole page. This new expanded space could be a great way to draw attention to important posts you want people to interact with. Things like photos and videos that are highlighted really stand out on a busy Facebook page.

Pinning a Facebook post

The other new option to call attention to important posts on your Facebook page is to Pin them. Pinning your posts places the update at the top of your Facebook page for 7 days. I use this personally for a Facebook page that hosts a regular event. We can post the announcement of the upcoming event and have it at the top of our page for a week. This way as you update your page regularly, your very important content can stay right up at the top of the page.

The new Timeline layout takes so getting used to but with some new features like the Cover Photo, Pinning and Highlighting – there is definitely some room to do some interesting things with your business page.

Businesses everywhere are getting used to the new Facebook Timeline. The largest change with the new layout is the large cover image at the top of every page.

Having such a large chunk of real estate that your business can control is a great opportunity. Recent research has shown that the cover image is now the most viewed thing on all Facebook business pages. Some businesses are having a really good time with the cover images and others feel a bit stuck with the large blank canvas.

Here are some things you should know about the new Facebook cover photos:

• Dimensions – Cover photo dimensions are 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels high. If you upload an image that is smaller than those dimensions, it will be stretched out to fit.
• Cover photos are not ad space – As tempting as it may be, the cover images cannot be used like an ad. Review the page guidelines for exactly what you can and cannot do with your page and your cover photo.

  Some things you cannot put in the cover photo:

  1. Your contact information
  2. Calls to action
  3. Direction, arrows or requests to ‘like this page’
  4. Price or purchase information
• Change your cover photo often – By changing your cover photo often, you are making your page more exciting for return visitors. Also when you do update the photo, it posts to your timeline and goes out to all of your subscribers. Large photo changes like that seem to just beg for fan interaction.

  Some ideas for cover photo changes:

  1. Feature different items, staff, fans, landscapes each week
  2. Announce events
  3. Get creative with your company logo
  4. Showcase customer testimonials
  5. Make people laugh
  6. Show your products being used by your customers
  7. Get attention with a catching photo
  8. Awards and recognitions
  9. Collages
• Get creative with your Cover Photo and your profile photo – Your profile photo rests nicely against your cover photo. Lots of people are getting very clever with this space. I found some great examples in this Social Media Examiner post

Facebook Cover Images are definitely a new opportunity to engage your fans and customers. How are you using this new space to get more engagement from your subscribers?

For more information on the new Facebook changes to business pages, check out our webinar next week: Business Facebook Pages – What You Need to Know

Links are like the currency of the internet.
Like a blog post? Link to it.
Like a product? Link to it.
Refer to a page on the internet for more information on any topic under the sun? Link to it.

Links from other sites to your website are great! They tell search engines that you are the trusted go-to for whatever it is they are linking to you for.

Internal links are really important too! An internal link is a link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Internal links can be found in your navigation and your sitemap but they should be in your website content too.

Internal links improve usability

As people come to your website and make their way around, internal links can help them with the flow of information. Many users even say they are more willing to click on links in your text versus a navigational item because there is a more natural transition to it.

Internal links for SEO

Search engines send little bots or spiders to regularly crawl your website. They determine what your site is about and if/when they should list it in their search results when someone searches for something. Internal links help search spiders figure out your website’s architecture. They tell the spiders the pathways on your site and which pages are most important. The most important pages will have the most links to them.

Important aspects of internal linking

When you are linking from one page of your site to another, you should make sure you have a few things:

• Make sure to add a link title that explains to the search engines where this link is going and what information they will find on that page.
• When you link a keyword to another page, make sure that keyword is on the next page that you are linking to.
• When adding internal links, make it look natural. Don’t link too much (see below).
• If you link to a page multiple times, mix up the anchor text or link title so you give the search engines an even better idea of what this page is about.
• Always add links and keywords to a site for users first and search engines second. Trust me – the happier the people, the happier the search engine.

Don’t over link

Search engines compare the amount of content on your site to the amount of links on your site. The less links on a page, the more value given to them. The more links on a page, the less value each link is given. Try not to have more than 100 links per page as a general rule.

Help out your website visitors and search engines by making sure you have a sound internal linking strategy in place!