Blogging with Google in Mind

By Michael Cash

Are you ready for your business to join the 21st Century? Before you answer this question, let me ask you another one: Are you ready to start a blog for your business? For many, the prospect of learning how to properly start, maintain, and optimize a blog for search engines is a monumental task that simply never gets done. But don’t let the enormity of the task stop you from doing it! You could be missing out on thousands of customers simply because your business has not joined the blogosphere. Setting up your business’s blog for search engine optimization (SEO) is the topic of this writing. The benefits of SEO far outweigh the labor it takes to set it up for your blog.

Basically, SEO is the foundation your blog needs to be ranked highly by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. It contains two parts: On-Page and Off-Page SEO. On-Page SEO are the things that you control about your blog, such as content, domain name, and plug-ins. Off-Page SEO are things outside of your control, such as links to your site from other blogs. Since On-Page SEO is directly affected by what you do, we will focus on that here.

Here are the things you can do to optimize your blog for search engines:

1. Domain Name - The first part of establishing your blog is choosing a domain name for it. Your domain name should contain the following:
   
   
   
   • Keyword(s) that relate to your blog
   
   
   • Be short and catchy if possible
   
   
   • Have the name of the blog in it
   
   
   
   



While sometimes it is not possible to fulfill these criteria, hitting 2 of the 3 will help optimize your blog for search engines.



2. Use keywords in your titles – This is important for SEO, as users who are searching for certain blogs or blog content will be directed to your site from a search engine if you have searchable keywords in your blog titles. That being said, don’t put too many keywords into one title, as this may make the title sound unnatural.


3. Optimize the body – The body of your blog posts is often overlooked when it comes to SEO, but the first and last paragraphs of your article are very important. Whatever your chosen keyword is for that post, use it two times in the first paragraph and once in the last paragraph. In addition, try and place it within the middle paragraphs a couple of times to grab greater search engine attention. However, DO NOT repeat your keyword too many times in the article, or search engines (specifically Google) will label it as keyword spam and this will ruin any SEO the blog could have had.


4. Use links in your posts – Using links in your posts to link important words to previous blog posts will assist in SEO. Search engines consider blogs that utilize links more authoritative than those that don’t, and will rank your blog higher than others. But once again, don’t overdue the links, as readers find them distracting and search engines dislike an overabundance of them.


5. Always have unique, interesting content – Search engines like interesting, original content to give to their users. Simply copying and pasting articles from other sources will be recognized by a search engine and will not optimize your article at all. Moreover, your content should be informative and fresh to enable SEO for your blog.

Now that you have the tools to utilize the benefits of SEO, it’s time to start that blog!

Michael Cash is a twenty something freelance writer and internet consultant residing in western Michigan. When he’s not coaching people out of 1990s era web practices, amateur astronomy and hiking take up his time. A completely random fact about Michael is that he used to “ghost hunt” as a youngster..

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

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Blogging with Google in Mind is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

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Fun with Google Search by Image

Google has a new Search by Image function and, if you haven’t used it yet, you’ve got to give it a try. If you haven’t heard about it yet, I’ll let this soothing, disembodied female voice explain it for me:

Get it? Okay, now that you’ve been given a crash course, let’s have some fun with Wpromote’s executive head shots. Below, I’ve matched up the Wpromoter with the first result in Google’s search by image. Let’s start with the big dog, Michael Mothner, Wpromote’s CEO:

It appears that Mothner has more in common with former Turkish National Soccer Team goalkeeper, Rüştü Reçber, than just his tenacious will to win. According to Google Search by Image, they share dashing good looks as well!

No, you’re not seeing double. On the left is our Controller, Ali Quinn-Angel, and on the left is renowned Romanian professor of history, Dr. Gelu Neamţu. They actually are not related in any way but, according to Google Search by Image, they’re practically twinsies!

Our Director of Marketing, Jamie Lane, is right at home putting together decks for potential clients, organizing the sales team for conferences and getting the word out about Wpromote’s services. In Google’s opinion, she might also find herself at home on the high seas as Captain of the infamous Black Pearl. By the way, Google, if you’re wondering, telling a woman that she looks like a hand-drawn Chinese poster for one of the Pirates movies is not as big of a compliment as you might think.

Okay, fair’s fair. I ran myself through Google Search by Image and Google determined that an accurate description of my head shot was “dinosaur cartoons.” Now, although that’s awesome, it influences the way that Google runs the search (the same thing happens with Michael Stone’s head shot). Because of this, Google matched me to a Yahoo Answers avatar that popped up on a question about the 1990s show Dinosaurs, which, evidently was not a cartoon. Either way, Google thinks I’m visually similar to a feminine, elfen creature about a tenth my own size… and I’m not sure how I feel about that!

So, if you use Chrome, try downloading the Google Search by Image extension. It’s a lot of fun and, over time, it’s likely to get a lot better. As you can see from the results above, there is still some work to be done before the tool is perfected. Until then, if you find out that Google thinks that someone you care about looks like anything other than an A-list celebrity (of the same gender!), you might be better off keeping it to yourself!

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Media With Benefits

I didn’t make up the phrase “Media with Benefits:” I heard it used by a media agency leader yesterday in a closed-door meeting I was hosting. (Since it was said in that context, I’ll let the originator stay anonymous or self-identify at their own discretion). It’s too rich a slogan not to seize and interpret here in The Drift. We can parse this phrase two different ways: both in terms of its intent and also through a broader existential interpretation that questions what a media seller really does for a living these days.

How It Was Originally Intended: From a media director’s point of view, it means “Yes, we’ll buy banners and pre-roll videos and push-downs and sponsorships from you, but we need you to add value. Give us insights, integration, creative support, special research. We can’t be seen as just buying placements anymore, and you can no longer afford to simply be a source for those placements.” If this post stopped here, it would have been a good and valuable read. This is the minimum that a media sales professional should be doing in the market today. Your job is to create value; you’ll just be getting compensated in media dollars.

The Larger Concept: The deeper, existential translation of “Media With Benefits” challenges the very nature of how the seller and the media sales organization see their place in the world.  The system for precisely distributing outbound advertising messages across the infinite supply of online “inventory” is fully in place, and that market is commoditized now and forever. If you’re selling “holes in pages” today, the best you can hope for is increasing “yield” while reducing friction and cost. (Newsflash: Google and Facebook have a pretty good head start on you.)

Hope is not lost, however. The answer for today’s media seller is to raise your aim, not lower it. Focus on (1) accomplishing marketing tasks, (2) creating compact, distributable marketing environments, and (3) doing it all by co-opting the same ad pipeline that’s about to commoditize and marginalize you.  In short, start pushing better stuff through the pipes.  Bring the marketer fresh creative concepts, research opportunities, information services, CRM options — you name it –and plan ways to distribute and fulfill them through the ridiculously intricate ecosystem of plumbing, networks and platforms we’ve built.

Marketers don’t need more media in which to advertise. Start leveraging our infrastructure to deliver true marketing benefits and you’ll find yourself happily back in the game.   Want to talk about some examples?  Give me a call.

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See Also:

• How To Capitalize On Your Company's 15 Minutes Of Fame
• How 5 Strange And Unknown Products Became Household Names

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