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I was recently notified that a client of ours received a sales lead through a blog that we write for them. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’m never surprised when I hear this because that’s precisely what a blog is supposed to do. This particular client is one who has been a customer for less than one month.

It’s important when blogging to think about what the customer is going to think when she reads it. A good understand of human psychology is essential. The thought process that goes into writing a blog post is one that requires a deep level of commitment to the human brain. And by that I mean simply that the blog post writer must consider the needs of the reader - the information and emotional needs - and meet those.

Great blogging is about more than search engine optimization. Of course, we always consider the SEO aspects of a blog post because if you don’t position your message in front of the greatest number of people within your target market as possible then it won’t matter how effective it is as communication. The message should communicate, but it also needs to be in front of a lot of people. That’s why SEO is important.

Conversely, getting your message before everyone in the world is not necessarily a good thing. If the communication is ineffective in drawing results then it doesn’t matter that 100,000 people saw it. Therefore, bloggers must have an ability to read readers’ minds.

That’s where psychology comes in. How will the reader receive the message? Will he be put off by it? Will it excite him or her? Will she pull out her credit card and make a purchase?

Closing the sale may not be the goal. In fact, for most blogs, the goal is not to close the sale at all, but to capture the lead. We want to drive traffic to your website so that you can close the sale. But to do that we must understand what it will take to get the visitor from the blog to your website. What will be the trigger that motivates the action? Bloggers who consider these things make much better bloggers than good writers who don’t.

Everyone, it seems, wants to make money from their blog, but blogging isn’t necessarily all about money. A blog can also be used for marketing purposes, to drive traffic and improve your SEO, which ultimately is about improving your search position for your important keywords.

When you monetize a blog through advertising - whether display, PPC, CPM, text links, or another model - you are really attempting to get people to click on those ads. You write content that encourages that. Some people use a mediocre or lousy content strategy. In other words, they purposely downplay their content so that visitors click the ads. It works for some of them, but you don’t want to do that on your business blog.

For your company blog, you really want to develop a relationship with the people who will do business with you. You want traffic and SEO benefits. By focusing on keyword-rich content that is valuable to human readers, you will increase your brand positioning as well as your company image, and that’s what really counts.

Audio blogging hasn’t caught on yet, but it will. It’s just a matter of time. All it requires is a microphone, which is built into most laptops now, and the software to record your voice. Audacity is a free software that can take care of that for you. With WordPress and its podcast plugin, you can have your very own audio blog.

To create an audio blog all you need to do is set up WordPress the way you would an ordinary blog and install PodPress, the plugin. Download Audacity then take an article that you’ve written and record yourself reading the article. You should also be able to find some free music that won’t require permission or a copyright notice to use as an and opening and closing theme. After you’ve got your podcast edited to your satisfaction, upload it through PodPress and write a description of 50-100 words to give the search spiders something to feed on. Otherwise, they won’t know your podcast is there. Save and publish and you now have an audio blog post. That simple.

Need a blog consultant?

When it comes to commercial blogging, there is more than one way to skin the mountain lion. Here are a few types of blogs that others have set up in the past:

• Made For AdSense - A Made For AdSense blog is a blog that you set up specifically to showcase AdSense ads. The content is there to attract organic search visitors for specific keywords and doesn’t really have to be that great. In fact, most of these blogs do not have good content at all because the owners really want their visitors to click the ads.
• Affiliate Blogs - An affiliate blog is set up to specifically promote one or more affiliate programs. You do want the content on these blogs to great content. You are not really selling the products that you are affiliates for. You are pre-selling. Your goal is to spark an interest in the product and drive traffic to the affiliate program’s website. When a visitor from your blog makes a purchase then you are paid a commission because your link has your own special affiliate ID code embedded in it.
• Onsite Company Blog - Your ownsite company blog is designed to be the face and voice of your company. You want good, solid content on this blog because every post is a separate web page that gives organic searchers a chance to find your company. Great for SEO, these blogs add fresh, daily content to your existing static website and that invites the search engine spiders to your site to crawl it more often.
• Offsite Promotional Blog - This type of blog is similar to a company blog, but it has a standalone web address. You definitely want to update this blog every day and add fresh content daily. Best used as a link building tool, the offsite promotional blog is very effective in driving traffic to individual pages on your company website. Through each blog post and through sidebar links, you can drive traffic right to where you want it to go.
• Product Promotions Blog - This type of blog is designed to promote one specific product or suite of products. You want the blog to have a name associated with the product that you are promoting. It can be “sponsored” by your company or be disassociated with your company, but its main goal is to promote the one product or family of products that you wish to promote. It can be on your company’s static website or have its own standalone web address.
• Industry Dialogue Blog - The Industry Dialogue Blog is designed to address important topics within your industry. The focus can be on your competitors, partners, and/or suppliers, or it can be on the industry itself. You can encourage dialogue within your industry or simply use the blog as a platform for addressing important topics within the industry.
• Customer Service Blog - A customer service blog is usually a part of your company’s website, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s primary focus is on delivery timely news on aspects related to your customers. It should communicate items of interest that any customer or prospect would be interested in and be used to provide better service and to solicit feedback on your service from your customers.
• Department Blog - Sometimes you have a department head who wants to address issues related to his department. In today’s complex, global business environment, you may have people within your department in different geographic regions who need to receive the same information. You can communicate that information through a department blog.

A blog can be used for any purpose, really. The important thing is that you communicate with the right audience in the right way. Need help setting up your blog? Just let us know.

Chris McElroy made a plug for BrowseRank on yesterday’s SEO Service Provider blog. Like many people in the search business, I believe that search is ready for a major innovation, but I’m not altogether sure that BrowseRank is the answer. At least, not the complete answer.

In the early days, before the Web went commercial, web pages were ranked according to how many academics thought the page was important. It made sense to do it this way because the Internet was largely a research tool for universities and the military-industrial complex. Since the majority of users were academics, more weight was placed on what academics considered weighty or important.

The second wave of what search engines considered trustworthy came when Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented BackRub, a tool that analyzed backlinks and use that information to rank web pages. This was a huge innovation. It was based on the previous incarnation mentioned above, but expanded on that to include links from non-academic websites. Shortly after, the Web was Google-ized and that algorithmic innovation became the norm for most search engines. New innovations that have been tried since then have tried to counter the importance of backlinks, but those innovations - every one of them - have failed to catch on popularly.

The State Of Search Today
The problem today is that many webmasters have learned to manipulate search results through uncanny backlink practices. Plus, the more-than-10-year-old algorithmic interpretation of results has made the Web a bit of a wild west due to an unprecedented increase in the number of web pages to be ranked, and a huge volume of link data to analyze, as well as a wide variety of types of websites and intent with regard to user interaction. Google’s algorithms tend to favor older sites with a lot of backlinks. That’s a problem because many newer sites are worthy of trust and recognition, but there is something to be said for longevity. So where is the balance?

The answer is, there isn’t any. Blogs and other temporal information can achieve high rankings on a short-term basis, but to achieve long-term success you’ll need to optimize your blog completely, not just each individual post. Still, there is a huge difference between the nature of a blog and the nature of a static website. So too there are huge differences between the nature of social sites like Facebook and MySpace and sites like Amazon and eBay where users may just show up, make a purchase, and leave.

Why BrowseRank Will Hurt Blogs
On the surface, BrowseRank seems like a good idea. The problem is it will tilt the weight of trust and reliability to sites where users are encouraged to remain for a long time. That doesn’t include blogs.

It is a statistical conclusion that blog readers typically read one post then they are gone. The bounce rate for blogs is very high. Many social bookmarking sites have the same problem as many bookmarkers will show up just to submit a story then leave. That this wasn’t the original purpose for bookmarking sites is irrelevant. The point is, that’s what users do. Should the sites be penalized because users don’t stick around long enough to make them more credible and “trustworthy”?

This phenomenon, of course, wouldn’t apply to Facebook or MySpace since users of those sites tend to stick around longer and use the tools available - creating applications, making friends, approving friends requests, etc. But what about auction sites and consumer sites where users just show up and buy something then leave? With BrowseRank, those sites might penalized and consumer review sites could end up ranking higher than consumer purchase sites for the same search term. Consumer blog sites would fall to the bottom.

While PageRank has its problems, I can see that BrowseRank will also have its issues. Those issues include, but are not limited to, favoritism of one type of site over another, the ease of gaming the results, and lack of human analysis since algorithms will do most of the work. Those are the same issues we have now with PageRank, but the difference will be that the problems will tilt the balance of favor from one type of site to another. Instead of older sites being favored as with PageRank, sites with lower bounce rates would be favored, but a low bounce rate is not always a bad thing.

Is There A Middle Ground Between
PageRank And BrowseRank?
I favor a combination of backlink analysis with on-site user behavior analysis. I do not necessarily mean the length of time that users remain on a site. There are other factors that are important for judging user behavior. For instance, do users tend to click internal site links or site exit links such as AdSense and display ads? If an algorithm favored the former then that might kill all those Made For AdSense sites that showcase useless keyword-stuffed content. On the other hand, it would also kill legitimate sites where the owners did a poor job of optimizing the content to encourage users to stick around longer instead of clicking the sidebar AdSense ads. That might be a good way to encourage better content.

What it necessary, I think, is a way to analyze the intended nature of a site and give weight to factors that are important to that nature. For instance, what is important for a successful blog is completely different than what is important for a successful static website. Perhaps one could be judged by the number of backlinks while the other is judged by the length of time users remain on the site. But if that static website is a consumer site where users are likely to show up and buy something then leave then perhaps it would be judged by another set of criteria entirely. This is somewhat what Google already does. Since Google analyzes over 150 search factors for any website on any given day, there is always a chance that a particular site is judged by what it does successfully AND by what it does half-heartedly or not successfully at all. It is the aggregate of the algorithmic analysis that is important, not the specific criteria.

I think we can all give kudos to MSN for attempting to take search in a new direction. MSN is certainly in a better position to challenge Google’s dominance than a new startup. The problem is that BrowseRank, in it’s current form, is incomplete. MSN could be on the right track, but before they commit to BrowseRank, they’ll need to put more thought into the nature of websites and the purpose for interaction in the first place.

Some new bloggers are confused about the difference between tags and categories so I’m going to try to clarify that for you now.

Categories are broad groups for blog posts within a niche. For instance, if you are writing a blog about real estate then you might have the following categories:

• Buyer Tips
• Seller Tips
• Mortgage Tips
• Open House

Generally speaking, you don’t want too many categories - 10 to 15 ought to do it. I don’t think I’d want more than 20, tops. But the purpose of the categories is to group all of your related blog posts so that readers can find them easily.

Now, what are tags?

Tags are a bit more specific than categories. While we recommend that you use categories as keywords, they don’t necessarily need to be keywords. But tags should be keywords that you mention in your blog posts. And keep this in mind: You can have individual blog posts in different categories use the same tags.

When you create tags, you want to use important words that are used in your blog posts. For instance, you might have two posts categorized in your Buyer Tips and Seller Tips categories that each mention negotiating and contracts. You could tag both blog posts with ‘negotiation’ and ‘contract’ tags and any other tags that are appropriate for the post. I wouldn’t use more than 5 or 6 tags per post, but they are meant to be specific keyword counters for specific individual blog posts without consideration for the category those posts are in. There is no limit to the number of tags you might have for your blog, but you should try to be consistent in your use of them.

Learn more about Blog Content Provider.

Do you have a method for writing your next blog post? I’ve hit upon a six-step process that is guaranteed to get your next blog a real boost in authority and sex appeal. Here’s the process:

1. Choose a category - Before you do anything else, pick your category. You should have a list of 10-15 categories in your blog repertoire. Start your blogging by choose the category. The category name, or a variation of it should be your keyword phrase.
2. Define your blog post’s keyword focus - If your category name is the keyword you’ll focus on for that blog then you’re OK. Feel free to modify the category name slightly so that every blog post in that category doesn’t use the exact same keyword phrase.
3. Write a highly optimized blog post - Write your blog post around your chosen keyword phrase, including necessary anchor text that points to the page on your website you want to promote.
4. Compose your blog post’s title - Make sure you use a keyword and that you write a blog post that tells readers precisely what to expect from your blog post.
5. Add your tags - If you are using the latest version of WordPress, pick 3-5 tags for your blog post.
6. Review and publish - Hit “Save” then preview your blog post. Fix any errors. After you’ve got a blog post that you can be proud of, hit “Publish.” Lovely, eh?

Enjoy your next blog post. This six-step process allows me to write a blog post in less than 10 minutes. If you know your topic well then you can write off the cuff and be done in no time. Your readers will think you spent hours on that blog post.

When it comes to blog posts, how short is too short?

Well, the real answer is, there is no too short. You can post a one sentence blog post and that’s better than nothing. But if you want a highly optimized blog post then the longer the better. But the real way to optimize blog posts is to make them not too short and not too long.

If it’s too long then no one will read it. If it’s too short then you might not get a good ranking in the search engines. There is an optimal length, but it isn’t counted in words or paragraphs. The optimal length is how much space you need to cover your topic adequately. But if all you can do on a given day is post, “Hey, just dropping in to say Hi,” it’s not optimal, but it’s better than nothing. Just don’t do that too often or your friends will think you don’t like them any more.

Everyone needs validation, right? Well, ghostwriter Crystal Smith recently gave me mine. She said the same thing that I’ve been saying for a couple of years now, since I started writing online. And it’s almost word for word. Here are a few snippets of brilliance from Crystal’s article on blogging and article writing:

Firms that specialize in online marketing will tell you that search engine ranking is of critical importance. To compete in your industry you need to rank well on Google and, to a lesser extent, on Yahoo and MSN.

OK, so it’s not genius level. It’s a repeat of what you’ve heard a million times. It never hurts to hear it again, does it? The fact is, search engine rankings are the most important measurements of online success and have the potential to drive your business to the highest levels of achievement. It’s getting there that is the battle.

There are two keys to ranking high - optimized content and link popularity.

Once again, two things that drive your rankings. Need I repeat them? Sure: optimized content and link popularity.

The main factors involved in optimizing content are keyword relevance and volume. Keywords are the terms used by people searching the Web. If your site is particularly relevant to the keyword term, it has a better chance of ranking well in the search engine results.

Keywords are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you mismanage them you could get a reputation as a spammer. On the other, you’ll be limp and ineffective. Proficient optimization requires the proper use of keywords throughout your content such that your writing appears natural but has the effect of feeding search engine spiders with the necessary food to elevate your web pages in the rankings.

To gauge whether your site is relevant to a keyword term, search engines need to see a lot of content. Pages should be between 400 and 500 words long.

There is no optimal length for web pages or blog posts, but you don’t want them too small. Anything less than 400 words in today’s competitive market is too small. Feed the spiders!

You should have a page for each keyword term you want to rank for, and the keyword phrase should appear about 2% of the time on that page. But you have to avoid spamming, that is, having the keyword just appear for no apparent reason. Keywords have to be used in context.

One aspect of optimization that many inexperienced Web writers miss is the semantic language aspect. Search engines now have the ability to analyze your content and make judgments about it regarding context. Synonyms and synonymous phrases can work wonders. It makes your content look natural and less contrived. Filling your content with keywords just to rank higher will likely not achieve the goal. I do believe in optimal keyword densities, but I would not go less than 2% on any page. Going higher depends on your content, the level of competition, the specific keyword phrase you are targeting, and your ability as a writer to achieve the necessary results.

The best way to manage the keyword ratio is to write well. Don’t just try to fill space.

Didn’t I just say that?

If there are lots of links pointing to your site, you are seen as an expert in your chosen field. As people figure out the tricks of keyword optimization, inbound links are becoming increasingly important to good search engine rankings.

People don’t realize it, but all you have to do is write good content and you’ll be linked to. If you don’t have other bloggers within your niche linking to your blog after three months then you are probably not writing good enough content.

Content for this blog post was taken from an article by Crystal Smith: Crystal Smith is a professional writer who specializes in search-engine-optimized Web site copy, article writing and blog posts. Writing samples and more information are available at http://www.tigerlilymedia.ca

Want to know more about blog optimization techniques and how to use your blog as a pre-sales tool with SEO benefits? Contact Blog Content Provider today.

Once you’ve blogged for awhile you’ll start to cover the same material. No matter how broad your niche, and we recommend narrowing your niche as far as you can without getting too narrow, eventually you’ll start writing about the same topics again. You might even inadvertently come up with duplicate blog post titles for some of those blog posts that cover the same topics. But how will the search engines deal with that?

Well, if the blog post titles are exactly the same then that could pose a problem for the search engines, depending on the structure of your permalink.

WordPress’s default permalink is a funky structure that uses a question mark followed by a string of syllables ending in the culmination of the number of your blog post. It looks like this:

http://www.blogcontentprovider.com/?p=123

That’s no good because you have no keywords in that permalink and keyword-based URLs are better for you in the search engines than a number. The ?p=123 follows your website’s main URL preceded by a forward slash (a / symbol).

WordPress does allow you to change the permalink structure, but it involves several steps and to do it correctly you’ll need access to your server through FTP so that you can alter your .htaccess file. Among the options that you have for changing the permalink in WordPress are:

• Day and Name structure (ex: http://www.blogcontentprovider.com/2008/06/18/sample-post/)
• Month and Name structure (ex: http://www.blogcontentprovider.com/2008/06/sample-post/)
• Numeric structure (ex: http://www.blogcontentprovider.com/archives/123)
• Custom structure

To change the permalink structure for your WordPress blog you’ll need to select the structure that you wish to use and save your changes, but the permalinks of your blog posts won’t be changed right away. In fact, if you click on a blog post then you won’t even be able to see it. You’ll get an error message. That’s because your .htaccess file has to be updated.

Save your changes and copy the code in the box at the bottom of the permalinks page inside of the WordPress admin area. Paste that code into your .htaccess file. If you don’t have one you’ll have to create one. But once you do that then you should be able to see your blog posts. Note that if you have been writing to your blog for any length of time before changing your permalink structure then you will have to 301 redirect all of your previously written blog posts to their new URLs. That will take some time and work so it’s best to change your permalink structure before you start blogging.

To make sure that your blog post titles do not create duplicate content issues for the search engines, choose a permalink structure that allows you to include the date of your newly created posts. That way, if you do have two blog posts with the same exact title, the date of the post will distinguish from each other and you won’t experience any duplicate content issues with the search engines.