Blogging is simple. As a blogger, the thought of “what should I talk about today” should not cross your mind. In fact, blogging does not have to be an hour long project that turns into a homework assignment. If you read what’s on the net in regards to your industry (or your clients industry if you blog for clients), then you have material to blog about. It’s as easy as 1-2-3.

Blogs are just a collection of your thoughts regarding a specified subject. Right? You really only have 3 things to work off of:

1. You read something in the industry and disagree with it;
2. You read something and agree with it;
3. You design your own ideas and opinions about something past, present, or future.

#1. Disagreement: You were clicking around and ran across an article. Mid paragraph you pull the BS card and fully disagree, or disagree to an extent of the matter, and you might even make a comment about it in their blog. It’s okay… vent away little blogger. You have your own venting corner on your own blog where you can gripe and call them out. Make sure to prove your points with reliable resources of course. Don’t forget to back track links.

#2. Agreement: You read an article and by golly it was like a hammer hitting a nail in full force. Awesome. Not only have you found a blogger you can relate to, but you also have something to blog about. “But I agree with it. Why would I blog about it?” you might ask yourself. Well, as a human being, you have extra thoughts on the subject. More things you might like to add and point out will be helpful for your readers. Again, back track links.

#3. Epiphany: You are lying in bed about to go to sleep and have an SEO epiphany. Being in the SEO industry, I know your brain doesn’t quit even when you lay down for bed. We eat, sleep, and breathe SEO right? So use these ideas for a blog. Get out a pen, jot down your thoughts, let it play out in your head, and blog about it.

So now that you know the 1-2-3’s of blogging, go update yours before it gets stale.

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After pondering over a few changes that I’ve seen recently, I’ve come to realize that Yahoo is fun and games, while Google is there to provide you with the most reliable resources to get the job done.

MyYahoo vs iGoogle:

As most of us are aware, Google offers you your own personalized iGoogle homepage once you are logged into your Google account. Just the same, Yahoo offers MyYahoo! personalized homepage once logged into your Yahoo account. Over the past few weeks, Yahoo has made big changes to their MyYahoo page to strongly resemble iGoogle’s features and tools. Seems almost apples to apples at first glance. However, Yahoo seems to have made their layout a little more functional, user friendly, and are working on adding even more social networking capabilities such as message boards.

Even more so, Yahoo allows you to customize both the color of your page (or theme if you wish), column layout of your page, and a feature to add further pages. As I am aware Google has all but one of these features, Yahoo seems to push the envelope with their design and easy to find “share this page” buttons. Yahoo earns 1 up on the fun factor here.

iGoogle focuses on a clean layout, few theme selections, and allows you to get down to business with what you want on your page. The tools are mostly provided by outside sources. You can integrate your Google calendar, news, and other various categories. Just looking at the popular categories to select from, we can tell the tools are for a more mature audience. Google earns 1 up on the Business factor.

Yahoo Features vs Google Features

Yahoo focuses more and more on the kids and teens (elementary/junior high)

- Yahoo 360
- Yahoo Games
- Yahoo Music
- Yahoo Kids (Yahooligans)

Google pulls in the older crowd (high school/college) with features such as:

- Scholar search
- Book Search
- News Search

Yahoo ask’s the audience, while Google gathers the facts from reliable resources. As much as reliability outweighs ‘he said she said’ answers, Yahoo answers has grown amazingly large and comes to the top for searches dealing with the question being asked.

So what have we learned today? Yahoo is fun and Google gets the job done.

How can we use this information to help out SEO/SEM?

SEO should be focused towards the target audience, and as we understand, each  search engine targets a specific audience. Have a client that is selling children’s toys? Get them set up with a PPC campaign through Yahoo. Have a client wanting to obtaining leads for car sells? Google is the way to go.

Posted in SEO Industry Rant | 1 Comment »

All websites should serve the purpose of either selling services/products, or informing their users. No matter what your business plan is, the user always comes first. To have a successful online marketing campaign, you have to corner your niche and target your audience.

There are an abundant amount of online marketers that push clicks and traffic as being a buying factor into their services. The line I use all too often is that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Horses are one thing, but when you start leading animals down to the watering hole that don’t naturally drink from them, conversions are 99 times harder to come by. This is why target marketing is so important in todays online industry.

Not only will target marketing be the soul driving factor of the search engines in the near future (I suspect within the next 3 years), it is also the easiest way to grab your audience and sell them on your purpose.

Social networks such as Facebook and Myspace are making it easier than ever before to create our own little sections and leach off it’s pre-defined juice (or users rather).

Recently I created a Mypsace profile for BestPartyEver.com to bring in targeted traffic. With BPE being it’s own social network for party goers, vendors, and event planners; what better audience to target than those already apart of a social network?

With this in mind, I also thought about the possibilities that Myspace already offers. Myspace has groups for users interested in different areas. Groups are probably one of the easiest places to scrounge around and dig up potential traffic. Since BPE is for parties, we can focus on the groups planning weddings, baby showers, army wifes, food vendors, and party/event planners.

Taking it a step beyond adding friends to our newly created Myspace, I added a list of services that we offered. This is to funnel the Myspace visitors to our BestPartyEver.com page.

Of course after users are so kindly to add us to their Myspace page, I have to thank them. What a better way than to create “comment stickers” or banners to lay out the basics of what BPE can provide to them as an individual. All comment stickers should focus on our groups for a more personal touch. Those planning a wedding will get “Plan your wedding with BPE,” and those holding a baby shower will get “Celebrate the birth of your baby using BPE” and the like.

Putting in the extra care to market a target audience per the individual’s wants and needs is a surefire way to not only increase your traffic, but your conversions as well.

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When will the search engines start to realize that it’s not the anchor text that counts so much as the text surrounding it? There are billions of great link backs out there from online newspapers, online journals, and respected online communities that point back to web pages using URL’s. Because these back links are straight URL’s, they aren’t getting the weight and credit they are worth.

How about also taking into consideration plain text URL’s that lack the link? There are billions of those lying around the internet giving back no creditability what so ever. These plain text links would be easy to detect with adding a small algorithm to their “spiders”. How hard can it possibly be to pick up on http:// and www and recognize that it is being a reference, or has importance, to the article?

As website owners, we don’t have much say so in how our website is being referenced. Great back links are being left out of the mix because online newspapers and journals are not here to feed your websites food to the search engines. Sometimes if you ask kind enough, high authority sites will allow you to pick your anchor text. Other than that, you are losing out on some great juice you naturally earned.

All I’m saying is give all links, even the little ones, a chance to make an impression for website rankings. There’s a lot of lost juice out there!

Posted in SEO Industry Rant | 2 Comments »