All posts in blogging

Web marketing is a constantly developing challenge and it can be useful to have staff who specialise in particular areas. That’s certainly true with online copywriting – there’s such a lot to consider that having a dedicated copywriter can make a real difference to your overall online performance.

But whether you’re a writer trying to perfect your online capabilities, or an SEO exec needing to brush up, there’s a wide range of issues to consider. Online copywriting poses its own challenges, from knowing the basics of HTML to understanding the ever-changing world of SEO.

So what help is available?

Even if you have the best intentions in the world, coming up with a constant stream of new ideas for blog posts can be pretty intimidating. All too soon, the corporate blog lies empty because the company has run out of ideas. Don’t let that happen to you! From company brainstorms to new ways of planning copy, we are going to provide you with some great tips on how to generate ideas for blog content.

WARNING: This is a long post, but we think it’s worth the read (and hopefully you’ll agree). If you really don’t have time then there’s a list of our top tips at the end!

Journalists have been frantically learning SEO and social media techniques over recent years, so they can stay ahead online. But now some of them are so skilled that SEO teams could learn a few things from them too. From writing clickable headlines, to using Twitter to network, here are all the journo skills that I’ve learnt by following (no, not stalking!) some of the best in the business…

Monitoring and Targeting

Like most blogs, news sites tend to cover a number of different subjects. For the main newspapers, these tend to be major topics such as politics, finance, property, jobs and so on. However, within those ‘channels’, similar stories often come up again and again – interest rates, house prices, unemployment figures, that kind of thing.

Journalists and editors use analytics programs to check how many readers are visiting each section and which stories are grabbing their interest. That means that they can give more coverage to the stories that really interest their readers, and move other stories further down the hierarchy. This also allows them to maximise click-throughs from their front pages because they know what stories get readers excited.

Since Google released the Panda update in February last year, the importance of having high-quality content on your site has increased hugely.

In May 2011, Amit Singhal published a post aimed to help people build better quality websites. One of the most important points to take away from it was, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, having good-quality content. Here I’m going to go into detail over some of his points and explain what you really need to do if you want to rank well.

Content strategy has always been a valued part of SEO and, with Google’s recent updates, it’s become increasingly important. No matter what size your business is, having a regular flow of good quality content on your site is essential.

However, content does take time to produce and, when you’re a small business, it can be hard to find the time or people to produce regular content for your site.

There are several options for small businesses to make the most of their resources and create a site with a steady stream of relevant, useful content. We’ll go through some of them here in order to help those of you who are finding it difficult to know where to start.

Getting visitors to go through your blog and enjoy what you have written isn’t the easiest thing on the planet. It requires time, patience and a lot of practice. To see evidence of visitor engagement you should see signs of regular activity and so should the visitor.

Here is some simple advice which might help keep your visitors engaged with your site and encourage them to come back for more.

Your goals should be:

  1. Receiving relevant comments
  2. People linking to & sharing your content
  3. Repeat visitors to your blog
  4. Build relationships

The real aim is to keep your content interesting and be proactive. Here are some tips for achieving these goals:

Friday saw the Distilled LinkLove conference in London, with an impressive line-up that included Rand Fishkin, Mike King and Wil Reynolds sharing their link building secrets.

Whether you’re agency or client-side, here is a useful little guide to link building tools and resources which Distilled gave out to help you improve on your link building activities:

Tools & Resources

Name Type What is it used for? Free / Paid
My Blog Guest Community Finding places to guest post Free & Paid versions
Blogger Link Up Community Link bloggers with content creators Free
Haro Community Link journalists with sources Free
Boomerang Browser Plugin Helping you with email outreach Free & Paid versions
Rapportive Browser Plugin Finding out more about the person you’re reaching out to Free
Multi Links for Firefox Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time rather than individually Free
Chrome Web Scraper Browser Plugin Scraper is a Google Chrome extension for getting data out of web pages and into spreadsheets Free
Chrome Link Clump Browser Plugin Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time Free
Buzzstream Software Managing outreach process Paid
GroupHigh Software Finding people to outreach to Paid
Raven Tools Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Open Site Explorer Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid
Ontolo Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Majestic SEO Software Tracking campaigns and analysis Paid
Zemanta Tactic Suggests your content to relevant bloggers Paid
Followerwonk Tool Contacting people & building relationships Free & Paid versions
Tom Anthony’ Link Profile Tool Tool Analyse your competitors link profiles and those of competitors to discover anomalous activities Free
JavaScript Bookmarklets Tool Use bookmarklets to improve efficiency of reporting and analysis Free
We Follow Tool Directory of Twitter users organized by interests Free
Citation Labs Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free
Linkdex Tool Tracking campaigns and analysis Free & Paid versions
Link Diagnosis Tool Backlink analysis & broken link checker Free
Link Builder from Wordtracker Tool Backlink analysis Free & Paid versions
Blog Dash Tool A permission-based blogger database Paid
Seeded Buzz Tactic Allows you to promote content to relevant bloggers Free & Paid versions

Back in December last year I wrote one of my first blog posts for SEOptimise entitled “How you can get over 79 Twitter followers in under 23 minutes – and why not to bother”.

From the title of the post, you can imagine that this post is regarding a similar topic, so you will not be required to do any of the following:

  • Write a ground-breaking blog post announcing how you have revolutionised the world
  • Give away freebies in order to be liked
  • Do any sort of “Like Gating”

like

Over the past decade, as blogging and social media marketing have become increasingly popular, some companies are now even outsourcing their blogs to be written by another agency.

I was surprised the other day when talking to a friend about how they measured the success of their company’s blog, that she mentioned one of their factors was getting more “Facebook Likes”.  At that moment I cringed, but it also gave me inspiration to write this.

Learning Objectives

Today’s post will show you how to get free likes on your blog post, but will also show you that getting 1000 Likes as opposed to 10 makes no real difference. I’ll also show you alternatives to how you can better monitor the success of your blogging campaign.

Today I spoke at the UK Search Awards Conference – presenting on how SEOptimise won a UK Search Award last year for best blog!

Here are my slides:

10 Steps to How We Built an Award-Winning Blog

View more presentations from Kevin Gibbons

If you have any questions on this, just let me know in the comments. We’re also attending (and presenting) at a lot of UK conferences coming up during the next months, including; BrightonSEO, IONSearch, SAScon and SMX London.

Like many agencies, blogger outreach constitutes a significant proportion of the time we spend link building. In our experience, it gets great links whilst maintaining a natural link profile. Until recently, we’d been recording our blogger outreach interactions in multiple spreadsheets in a rather inefficient manner. So we decided it was time to streamline the process and we’re currently trialing a blogger outreach tool called BuzzStream.

We’ve just wrapped up a successful blog-based campaign for a client during which we relied heavily on BuzzStream and as a result, I have a few comments on its effectiveness, usability and flaws which I thought I’d share. Perhaps it would be useful to divide them into pros and cons:

Pros

Tracks all your communications in one place – you can set it so that any communication between you and an email address in BuzzStream gets saved in the contact card for that person. It automatically updates the ‘last communication’ field so that you can immediately see when you last interacted with that person. This means that someone else working on the project can see communication between another team member and the person being contacted, which is really useful if you have more than one person working on the project.

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