Dude, Blog Your Business!

For all you Phoenix locals who really want to find out what blogging and social media is all about, you might want to head down to Mesa on January 27th, 2009 for the SEVRAR / BlueRoof360.com Technology Conference. Although the focus of the conference is on social media for the real estate industry there is a lot here for any business looking to get into social media marketing.

This is a free, all-day conference (which is a treat in itself – usually these things are expensive), and there are going to be a lot of good speakers there, including Chip Lambert – LinkedIn Master Instructor and Bill Austin – our local ’social media guru’. Anyone who wants to find out more about Blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn, Search Engine Optimization, & Other Social Media will have the chance to talk one-on-one to the experts.

Myself (Jasper Blake of Dude Blog Your Business) and Tom Hinchey (Hinchey Studios) will both be there and are happy to discuss what we are doing in terms of video blogging. It should be an interesting day all round.

For the full program and sign-up details (you need to book lunch if you want it) – click here.

 
I was delighted to hear from Darren Stevenson of Darren Stevenson Photography LLC following a comment I placed in answer to a question on LinkedIn. Darren asked me to take a look at his blog - www.poppa-d.blogspot.com/ and let him know if there were any improvements I could suggest.

I have to say that, overall, Darren was very much along the right tracks with his blog. The one big plus that is often absent in a lot of blogs is that he has great images in both the sidebar and with every post. Being a photographer he is fortunate to have access to an unlimited number of his own images and, of course, images are a vital part of using his blog to market his photography business.

Probably the one single greatest bit of advice I could give him was that he could make far more of the SEO opportunities with his images. Dave and I have written about this in other posts – just click on the “Blogging Advice” link in the category menu, or “SEO” in the Tag cloud if you want to read the post – but suffice it to say images are a vital part of SEO in blogs – everyone needs to use them.

One of the things Darren had very much got right with his blog is the establishing of himself firmly within the context of the area (Arizona) where his business was located – what we like to call ‘geo-targeting’. If your business is firmly tied to a specific geographical area it is very important that visitors (potential clients), get a sense of you as a ‘local’ businessperson. In order to achieve that you need to talk/post about your activities within that context.

Blogging is a very powerful medium and a little knowledge can make an incredible difference to how successful your business blog is in terms of online marketing. That is what we are here for.

We always recommend to our business clients that they use images in their blog posts. Not only does it make it much more interesting for the reader, it makes the whole blog much more attractive and enticing, much more likely to encourage the casual browser to stay and explore deeper. However, images are also extremely effective SEO tools as well.
 
The two places you need to optimize for the search engines when it comes to images are the image file name and the alt tags. The file name is a great opportunity to use one or two relevant keywords. Instead of naming your image “pic1.jpg”, name it something useful. For example, I named the image for this post “blog_seo_tips.jpg” –  3 good keywords that could be picked up by the search engines. You can further enhance the SEO by filling in the alt=”*” tags in the html view – for example, “How images in blogs enhance SEO”. ALT tags are the things that describe the image, showing up as text as you mouse over the image itself. Search engines look for subject relevant text and these are two additional places where you can get those keywords found.

Images should always be relevant to the subject and should be used at at least medium size if not large. Thumbnail images should be avoided as they just don’t look right in the blog post, and large images are more likely to be perceived as important to the post’s textual content. It probably sounds obvious but you should also make sure that you use good quality images. Badly framed or blurry images will create a poor impression of your blog and by implication, your business. Also, always place the image at the top and center justify for large images, left justify for smaller images which will let the text flow around the right edge of the image. It is important to be consistent so that your blog has a uniform and professional look.

Finally, if you can, vary your images with the odd video. Find something relevant on YouTube – they are easy to embed into your blog and, although you don’t get to use alt tags with them, it does make it a more varied and interesting experience for your readers – and that, afterall is the most important aspect of any blog, business or otherwise!

We strongly believe that business owners should post on their own blogs, as I have said before. But this also means that business owners need to keep on top of their own Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well – unless they want to pay an SEO company to do it for them. Few do. Part of what we offer is the tuition that businesses require to maintain their own blogs. How quickly a business can do this will depend on their overall knowledge of blogging and the amount of time they have to put towards blog posting and maintenance.

Some of our clients chose to ease themselves into maintaining their own blogs and purchase a package whereby we post on the blog for a certain period of time and manage their SEO for them as they get used to how it all works. And there is a lot to learn! One thing businesses need to be aware of is that Google is constantly updating and improving the algorithms it uses to rank websites. What works well in one instance might not work as well a few months later. We certainly try to teach clients all the main SEO techniques, and how to utilise their key words to best advantage as part of our posting/maintenance packages but, once they cut loose on their own they will need to keep up with the changing practices.

The one thing both Dave and I love about the internet is that everything is available for free, and SEO advice is certainly no exception. Just type in the words “free SEO advice” into your search bar and you will come up with no end of blogs and websites that will give you all the latest tips and tricks. Just don’t be tempted by some of the SEO cheats out there – they’ll come back to bite you in the end. Keep it real, find a reliable SEO-tips blog or two, read them regularly and follow their advice – you’ll be fine.