Posts Tagged ‘blog’

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Make Your Blog Work to Promote Your Business

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

Business blogging is something that has become quite popular recently as people realize just how powerful blogs can be. The constant content added to blogs means they are extremely popular with Google and other search engines and if they are properly optimized, they show up quickly in the top results.

Successful Business Blogging

There are a few things to keep in mind if you want your business blog to be a success.

  • Make the posts worth reading. There`s nothing worse than finding what you think is a useful resource and then discovering it`s only a one paragraph blog post that is crammed with keywords and links to a business site.
  • Keep it short. Most people online aren`t looking for essays, so keep your blog posts neat and clean and easy to read. Bullet points and lists like this one can really help keep things nice and clear.
  • Don`t link excessively. One link, or two at most, is fine for the majority of business blogging. There`s no need to cram your post full of links to your business site, which can look spammy and have the opposite effect of what you want.

Business blogging really is a great way to get some extra publicity, but only if you do it right. Make your blog worth something and people will keep coming back.

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Posted in Blogging for Small Business | No Comments »

Optimizing Your Blog For Business

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Charles McKeever has a great post about the importance of optimizing your business blog. I fully agree with his two recommendations. He suggests the following two websites to help you better analyze your blog so that you can make the proper changes and more efficiently optimize your blog’s performance:

  • WebsiteOptimization.com
  • Google’s Website Optimizer

WebsiteOptimization.com is a great resource and all you have to do is type your blog’s URL into the box and the website will return an analysis of your elements. It looks at html, css, graphics, and both internal and external files to see where you can improve your blog’s load time and make it more crawlable. These are important issues. The slower your load time the less likely people will stick around to read and you also get dinged a little bit from the search engines and you’ll have a lower PageRank. So you want to increase your load time as much as possible. It’s a free tool and highly valuable.

Google’s Website Optimizer is probably the best tool on the planet. Through this tool you can test different versions of a web page before it goes live. It allows you to test two versions of the same web page to see which one will perform better for you and increases your ROI. But you can also perform multivariate testing, which allows you to test several elements side by side to see where on the page you’d like to place them. Highly beneficial.

If you are doing any kind of business online and you own a website, I highly recommend both of these tools. They will help you grow your business the smart way – by optimizing it for maximum performance.

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Posted in Blogging for Small Business, SEO for Small Business | No Comments »

Spammers Suck, So Says Do-Follow Matt

Monday, June 30th, 2008

I agree. Spammers are no fun to hang out with. That’s why you need to be real careful about your comment policy. WordPress automatically makes all links no-follow. That means a link that you create from a WordPress blog back to your own blog does not compute for link building purposes. Get all the links you want and you are not going to help your link building strategy.

But, wait a minute …

WordPress has a plugin. Bloggers who install the WordPress do-follow plugin are setting themselves up for spam. As soon as you make all of the links on your blog pass on the link juice then everybody and pet dog wants to get in on the action. You essentially become the easiest girl in your class. Is that the kind of reputation you want?

I understand the desire for webmasters to want to reward their comments with the much coveted link credit. But know that when you do that you are opening up the spam dam so the flood can rush through. A better alternative might be the plugin that passes do-follow juice only to the top commentators on your blog. New commentators must earn the right to get that juice by leaving well-thought-of useful comments over a period of time.

Sounds like a good compromise to me. I’m sure Matt will agree.

Read why blogging is an essential business practice.

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Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 1 Comment »

What Is A Permalink And Why Do I Need One?

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

A permalink is the URL of a specific blog post once it has moved beyond your home page into the archives. It is the part of the URL that follows the first / in your blog post’s URL.

For instance, the Small Business Mavericks blog URL is http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing. Each individual blog post has its own URL that is designated by the website URL followed by the / symbol and usually the title of the post. Yesterday’s blog post permalink is http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing/seo-for-small-business/5-seo-tips-to-improve-your-business-website/04/30/2008/.

That’s pretty long, isn’t it?

The part that follows the second / and begins with the word “seo” is the blog post’s specific page URL. In the case of this blog, the permalink consists of the name of the category into which that blog post was set (SEO For Small Business) followed by a / symbol and the name of the blog post (5 SEO Tips To Improve Your Business Website) followed by another / and the date of the post.

You can format your permalinks any way you want. You can format them with or without your category names. You can format them with or without the dates. You can even shorten the post part of the URL with some blogging platforms, such as WordPress, by finding the place in the system that allows you to do that and manually changing the URL “slug.” When you do that, your title will not be changed, but the actual URL, or permalink, will.

The permalink is what tells search engines and human visitors where to find each individual blog post. It is a necessary part of that blog post’s address and if you write about the same topics often then you’ll want to make sure that each blog post has a unique permalink.

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Reputation Management: Simple Tips Anyone Can Use

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

There are two main areas of reputation management. The first is knowing what people are saying about you and the second is getting your name out in the manner you want to be thought of. There are many ways to manage your business reputation, but I´m just going to give you a few in each area to get you started.

Reputation Management Tips: Other People

  • Subscribe to Google Alerts. You should set up different alerts using your business name, title and your own name. This way, anytime anyone blogs about you, it will come up in Google Alerts.
  • Do regular searches. Checking the top search engines for your business name and products will bring up any non-blogging sites to let you know what other people are saying about you.
  • Hire it out. Don´t have the time to stay on top of all this? Then you might want to look at hiring someone else to keep track of all positive and negative feedback.

Reputation Management Tips You Can Use

  • Send out press releases. These will help your business gain a lot of publicity and it is controlled, since you write the press release.
  • Maintain a good relationship with other bloggers. Getting along with bloggers in your field increases the chances of them publishing information about you. It really only takes a little time to become a regular commenter on several blogs and you´ll be building for the future.
  • Keep up the article marketing. Steady feeding of new articles into article directories and websites will bring in more traffic and also help you establish your reputation as an expert.

Caroline
Small Business Mavericks
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