What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of researching and molding a website’s content and content tags to reach the desired audience that is searching for specific products, topics, or services using Internet search engines. Sites often look pleasing to the human eye but are unreadable to search engine spiders. I think of a search spider as if they were a 1st grader wondering through my site. Different pages of the site have to be clearly marked with descriptive texts so that the spider knows what it is looking at. No links can be completely buried or they will never be found. A simplified sitemap with links to all the important areas of your site is a must. Link to the sitemap from every page of your site so the spider never gets completely lost.

Using Common Sense SEO Practices
A common sense approach to site building is often the best SEO tactic. When you are linking to internal pages or article on your own site think twice about the words that you use for the link titles. The relevancy of any page in Google is heavily weighted to the keywords used in the link titles on external sites and pages that link to it. If you are linking to certain pages/areas of your site on all your pages, make sure that you use descriptive link titles. For example, many people link to “Contact” on each page of their site. Who searches for just the word “contact”? Using the title “Contact Jim Brown” for the link will boost the page and overall site relevance for “Jim Brown”. I see problems like this all the time on E-commerce sites where the designers have a link to “Products” instead of “Laptop Products” or “Cell Phone Products”. Do they think people just go to Google and type in “products” and hit enter?

A Flexible CMS (Content Management System)
Using a CMS (Content Management System) is necessary unless you want to constantly edit 100s of pages each time you discover something that has a positive effect on your ranking. Nearly all open source CMS systems have plugins available that will improve many important aspects of your site’s readability to search spiders. One of the main reasons I like CMS systems are because they allow you to create the URL for the article on the fly, totally based on what title you type in. Google and other search engines give relevancy points if they keyword is also contained in the url.

Experience Counts
To better understand how to get your web site ranking higher in search results, it’s necessary to understand which terms you should focus on ranking for, and the logic used by different search engines to serve their results. There is not substitute for experience and continuous education when trying to decipher Google’s logic for how they determine the order of their search results. You need to locate some trustworthy forums, twitter users, and SEO experts on various social networking sites where you can dig into the latest SEO topics and tactics. No time for SEO? Hire an agency.

All in One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin

Lately I’ve had a need for broad SEO tweaking on various websites I’ve been converting over to WordPress.   Many of these sites are coming in with very generic title structures and keyword placements.  One of the first steps I take to immediately improve search optimization is install the  “All in one SEO Pack”.

Info & Download:  http://wordpress.org…(visit external link)

Feature Overview:

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For Wordpress 2.7 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Things To Write In Your Business Blog

Great News! Your boss has informed you the friendly IT department has setup a personal blog area for each staff member, linked to from the primary corporate site, now what the hell are you going to include on this thing?  If you can’t figure out the first step you aren’t alone, I’ll be your teammate.

Things I’ve ruled out posting about :

What I did over the weekend.  Why I hate Mondays and weekends.  Trade Secrets.  Trying to define what Sensitive Information is or isn’t.

Things I consider positive about this type of blog:

It’s like a brochure for yourself, that is up to date and evolves.  The entire blog should be a carefully crafted sales pitch that doesn’t offend the user by making them feel like they are reading a bunch of bullcrap.   If you, or your products/services suck, you should not create a blog.   Tell your boss it will hurt your sales.

I think including brief posts about potential deals in a way that strokes the potential client’s ego could be a useful tool depending on what industry you are in .  You can always remove the post (or edit it) if they don’t sign.

If you don’t plan to update your blog more than twice per month, you should make sure the date tags are basically removed from the major areas and only contained on the posted article’s page itself.  This will keep your primary blog area from seeming outdated.

Here are the top 10 business benefits of blogging.

1. Search Engine Marketing
Spidering search engines like Google love websites that are regularly updated with fresh, well written, keyword-rich content. People will be able to find your website more easily (because Google will list more pages), Google will re-index your site more frequently (meaning new pages you put online will appear in the search results more quickly) and it will also give your rankings a boost

2. Direct Communications
Over time will you will build up a readership of people who have subscribed to receive updates to your blog because they are interested in what you have to say. Every time you publish a new article it gets pushed out to all your readers giving you the ability to communicate directly with your target audience. For example we are primarily a web design company so we write about web design and everything relating to it.

3. Brand Building
A blog is a great way to get your brand in front of thousands of people who otherwise would never know you existed.

4. Competitive Differentiation
How will your potential customers know what makes you different from your competitors? You will tell them on your blog! Show them how you work, what sets you apart and how your solution to their challenges is unique.

5. Relational Marketing
Successful selling is all about building relationships. By posting honest, transparent, heart-felt articles on your blog you will instill trust and respect in your potential customers. The best blogs are a 2-way communication where your readers can comment on your articles. This interaction gets them more involved and more engaged.

6. Social Media Marketing
Community sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and social bookmarking sites like delicious, Stumbleupon and digg can produce astounding results. If you are lucky enough to have one of your blog articles go ‘viral’ on one of these sites you should brace yourself for a surge of new website visitors and possibly some high quality inbound links.

7. Media & Public Relations
The chances are if you are running a blog but your competitors are not the media will contact you, not them.

8. Position Yourself as an Expert
Are you an expert in your field? Well tell the world on your blog. If you really know what you are talking about people will pay attention and before you know it you will have a dedicated following of readers who hang on your every word! These people are also far more likely to buy from you.

9. Reputation Management
Do you know what is being said about you online? Do you have a platform to counter any negative press your company is receiving? With a blog you do. It is one way you can help to manage your online reputation.

10. Low Cost
Setting up a blog doesn’t cost very much and maintaining one costs practically nothing.

Special Thanks to Simon Rycoft from the Benefits List.