A considerable portion of my consulting time has recently revolved around the optimization of corporate blogs (or the addition of blogs to revamped sites). As usual, I find a pattern emerging in the strategies that need attention and the pitfalls that must be avoided. So, rather than charging $400 an hour to give advice on the subject, I thought it would be valuable to share many of the most common pieces of advice here on the blog (business part of Rand fights with open source Rand, but loses, as usual).
- Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.
- - Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
- - Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
- - Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).
- - Tag Your Content
Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
- - Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.
- - Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
- - Link Intelligently
When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
- - Invite Guest Bloggers
Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
- - Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular)
I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
- - Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
- - Cover Topics that Need Attention
In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
- - Pay Attention to Your Analytics
Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
- - Use a Human Voice
Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
- - Archive Effectively
The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
- - Implement Smart URLs
The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
- - Reveal as Much as Possible
The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
- - Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
- - Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days
If you do have linkbait, whether by design or by accident, make sure to capitalize. When you hit the front page of Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, or, on a smaller scale, attract a couple hundred visitors from a bigger blog or site in your space, you need to put your best foot forward. Make sure to follow up on a high traffic time period with 2-3 high quality posts that show off your skills as a writer, your depth of understanding and let visitors know that this is content they should be sticking around to see more of. Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors.
- - Create Expectations and Fulfill Them
When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
- - Build a Brand
Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.
Best of luck to all you bloggers out there. It's an increasingly crowded field to play in, but these strategies should help to give you an edge over the competition. As always, if you've got additions or disagreements, I'd love to hear them.
p.s. Note to self - starting long blog entries at 11:30pm is not conducive to a good night's sleep. At least Angela got kicked off Project Runway tonight.
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Seriously though, nice list, I'll be linking to it for our internal teams to have a look at :P
Interesting to note your comments about the blog url's. Please post the results once seomoz switches to some new url's.
Oh, and in #2, you have "From best to worst" but list them from worst to best. ;) I think we all got the idea, though. ;)
However, I must add to the smart urls (generally on page optimization), like any other site look at how the SEs see your blog.
For example I was wondering for quite some time why don't you use metatags at SEOmoz which causes this because of -is there a limit to links? I can't seem to get the second link to display, just click on the "repeat the search with the omitted results included." to see what I unseccussfully try to link to-(notice the same snippet on all entries)
I am not actually sure if that hurts rankings but I prefer to be on the safe side. Edited by am9905d on Thu (8/31/06) at 05:22 AM
By the way for a midnight post it is still very well written!
Thanks Rand!
I'm going to link to this for our audience: publishers of magazines, newspapers, books, and other publications, most of whom are experimenting with--and struggling with--blogs, too.
I created an easy to use app to create both tags and social bookmarklets. You can use it freely here:
http://www.evilgeniusmarketing.com/ice/tag-ge...
This is good for anyone who doesn't want to mess with plugins or hand-cooked their own blog software (like I did from an opensource version). Just generates plain HTML, complete with classes ready for you to add to your CSS so you can seamlessly integrate it into your blogs look at feel.
I wrote an article about this stuff over a year ago which can be found at:
http://www.evilgeniusmarketing.com/ice/web-ma...
Thanks for the list. A nice complement to Andy Beal's list (I got the link from Andy's blog first...but only because he is alphabetically listed before you in my feedreader. *grin*).
Cheers!
You've inspired me to talk about your list over on my company blog where I mention my favorite points you make and encourage anyone who visits to check out your post.
Thanks!
My first post on your blog...
I have subscribed to this blog for a while and now feel compelled to comment. :)
Detailed post on blogging, Rand, nice its helped confirm some ideas I had previously come up on my own on generating link bait and offered new suggestions... particularly "don't jump on the bandwagon" and "launching without comments" (cause its a lonely place when nobody comments on your blog - I've had just a few comments on my own blog so that at least makes it worthwhile!)
Getting guest writers... hmmm who would wish to be a guest writer on a blog no-one else knows about... easier said than done?
Especially when everyone is so busy these days, the last thing they'd want to do is guest write for an obscure blog? Would that not be a next to impossible task...? How many requests do you personally get to guest blog elsewhere? How many do you take up?
Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon have all worked for promoting my website articles rather than my actual blog - not as well as some others report, but its in the tens for sure, possibly the hundreds rather than the thousands but if it helps at least one person then thats great.
Keep up the great blog, you, your team and your guest bloggers really do brighten up my working day (especially from grey old England!)
Daz
I have a blog on one of my sites and I have links to the most popular blog topics on the homepage of my site. This drives traffic into the blog and also increases my homepage content breadth.
One particular point you mentions was in #2: hosting the blog in the "sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution)." I was thinking about this the other night actually. I started my blog years ago and didn't know better, but now I wish it was off a subdomain or dir. I have hundreds of posts and thousands of backlinks to a lot of posts, so for the past few days I've been trying to see if moving it off the base domain was feasible. Looks like I might be stuck.
All your other points were noteworthy too. I see a few other areas I can improve on. Thanks for the great advice!
Of course, YMMV, but I've done it before and it seems to work quite well - why fix things that aren't broken?
Can someone please help me understand why pagination causes duplicate content? This is what Rand mentioned in the post:
i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php?&start=25 and http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php?&start=50 Edited by randfish on Thu (8/31/06) at 01:26 PM
One of my sites centers around style and music, and while technically a blog it's definitely not a place where I post pictures of my dog. I've found that in my case advertising benefits the look and feel of the blog and almost legitimizes the site.
Sure - on my personal blog ads would look ridiculous - but depending on what you blog about and what your particular industry is, the ads can help (we do however have related ads, not just AdSense). If you can get up 'real' ads, even while you're small, I've found that many people assume you're more established than you really are...much like your advice to leave comments off during the early days.
--Sean
Thank you very much for this article.
I think I get a score of 5 out of 21. Sheesh, looks like I need to hire a blog consultant!
Edited by Jamie on Thu (8/31/06) at 05:45 PM
And I can't believe you watch PR too. I know Angela is kind of "kookie" but Jeffrey is an ass!! He's just one mean dude and I hated his jet setter outfit. What's that thing on his crotch? Oh, can I say that word here?
I am happily surprised and impressed that a blog with the word SEO in the domain is covering the important nuances of branding. Most SEO people are two dimensional (the page rank dimension and the SERP dimension). Im subscribing to your blog today. Good stuff.
...and I'm using a picture of a freakin monkey! Edited by roadies on Thu (8/31/06) at 10:28 PM
I subscribe to a few SEO newsletters that go on and on about how to optimize blog HTML, meta tags, content, outbound links, etc., but never address the points you covered.
This article explains the foundation of building a great blog in an easy to read, easy to remember style. Defininitely bookmarking it for future use as my blog falls far short of this simple list. You've definitely got another new subscriber.
I'd say that it's good to allow comments from the very beginning. This way even if you get 2-4 comments per popular post you can see the reaction of the reader. That's always helpful.
.. but, how about internal links? If you are good about linking to other posts that you've written, then the drive-by visitor has more of an opportunity to click to a second post and become more involved with your blog and maybe convert (whether conversion be a subscription or a click through to an ad or even a phone call for help with their SEO.) And this is oh so true when you decide to do a multi-part blog and don't link back and forth to all the different pieces.
Maybe you didn't mention blogrolling because it is so obvious? Sometimes, it is asking to be blogrolled that is the artful part. A good way to get blogrolled it to start by blogrolling the target site, when that is reasonable and will actually get noticed.
Do for others and they will do for you. For sure, it's great to mention your blog on a forum, but even greater when someone else mentions your blog. If you mention other blogs on a forum where you are very involved (and you know the people who write those blogs), you'll see them mention your blog, too. Everyone wins.
Put a link to your blog in your email signature. Tag it with your web analytics so that you can see how well it works for you. (Because, if it isn't working, you might as well take it out, you've got lots of other things to advertise in that space, probably.)
Everyone is on top of, "write often," but here is a controversial one: don't write too often. If you guys weren't so interesting, I would have unsubscribed long ago. If I can't keep up with a blog and the content isn't compelling, I have to give it up. This is probably very personal - most people may not have the same need for control that I do. (Is it any wonder that I work in web analytics and conversion rate?)
Well, that brings you up to 25. 26 if you want to count the "don't blog too often." 27 if you count your best advice of all, i.e. don't start blogging late at night.
Robbin
Seriously, this is a good deal. Rand's time is worth $1,000 an hour - I charge $500 personally. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many people you can consult with. A 4-hour session with Rand can seriously help your business succeed. I'd take him up on that offer while his fees are still reasonable.
I agree with Mad4 here re: URLs. You talk a bit about changing things to say /1347/ but it seems you are still using ?ID=1347. I'd be very interested to hear why that is, as I honestly find "this-is-the-title" URLs much more user-friendly.
Also, I have been using Mint lately and find the stats to be quite nice in comparison to the rather expensive options you mentioned. At only $30 until the next major version releases and with free updates until then it definitely a good value. And if other users find that steep there's always Google Analytics which are so bad at all, they just have a hard time holding a candle to Mint with the right Peppers. Edited by blandname on Sat (9/2/06) at 12:56 AM
About time someone with some authority said it! Thank you.
I'm getting a little tied of the AdSense ads plastered on every blog. I think it waters down any brand building you may be trying to do with your blog.