Spinfield – SEO & Internet Marketing Blog

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In my efforts to help clients make the most of their websites, I suggest that they put valuable time and resources into a blog. A blog added to a website can be an integral part of online success, but quite often this idea is met with resistance.

Most business owners understand the necessity of having a web presence, but many don’t realize how an online presence, if done well, is a powerful way to connect with customers, define and promote their brand, and ultimately make their business stronger.

And one of the most effective ways to realize this online potential is with a blog.

And when I strongly suggest adding a blog to a client website, I usually hear the same excuses why it’s not a good idea. Here are the 3 most common:

Excuse #1: Blogging Takes Too Much Time

Blogging is a lot of work. It takes time, resources, perseverance, and dedication, but the truth is that for most businesses it’s time well spent. And the time spent can be divided among various members of the company. In some cases the writing can even be contracted out.

Excuse #2: I Don’t Have Anything  Interesting To Write About

No matter what industry, you do have a tale to tell. Tell the customers about the human side of your company, the struggles, success, and personalities of the people who make up the company. Your customers will identify with you and will be more likely to do business with you.

A blog is also a great vehicle to inform the public of new products, industry trends and more. And the feedback you will get from reader comments can be invaluable.

Also remember that a blog post doesn’t have to be very long, 300 to 500 words will do. Most people won’t read a 1000 word article anyhow.

Excuse #3: I Don’t See How A Blog Will Help My Business

The points already covered above go a long way to answer this question. A blog will allow you to show a more personal side of your business, as well as establish and maintain a relationship with current and potential customers. It will help you to keep your customers current on the trends of your industry, as well as get excellent feedback from your customers.

But a blog is also an excellent tool to help your potential customers find you on the web. A well done blog is ever growing, dynamic, engaging and informative. And every new page is a hook in the vast ocean that is the internet. Ssearch engines like sites that are constantly adding new contact, so your website is less likely to get buried deep within the search results. And some blog features, for example an RSS feed, make search optimization efforts much more effective.

Chances are at least some of your competitors are already blogging. Can you afford not too?

Comedian Steven Wright used to joke that he had a packet of dehydrated water but he didn’t know what to add. That kind of confusion is like what’s going on right now in the SEO community since the introduction of Google Instant.

The “experts” are arguing among themselves about how Instant is going to effect SEO, and what we should all do about it. It’s been stated that SEO is dead, and that Instant will have no effect whatsoever, and everything in between.

Is Instant The Death Of SEO?

Uh, no. This idea is just ridiculous. Instant shows search query results based on a prediction of what is being searched for. These results are still the product of the Google algorithm, which by the way, Google says has not changed.

Of course the algorithm will change, as it has before and so what? That hasn’t killed SEO before, so why would a change kill SEO now?

People will still be plugging keywords into Google to find information, goods and services. Companies will still put up websites and try to capture the eyeballs of all those people plugging in the keywords. They will still hire an “expert” to help them get those eyeballs, and coveted clicks that follow.

All you folks out there who make a living trying to figure out how Google sorts those results, won’t have to start flipping burgers anytime soon.

Instant may change SEO, it may not, but it won’t kill it.

Does Google Instant Matter?

Yes. Maybe. We’ll see. I don’t know…

Of course it matters, but how? What does Instant change?

I really don’t have an answer. I’m sure it changes something, but I can’t figure out what.

It seems to me that the only searcher it may influence is the person who doesn’t really know what they are looking for. I’m not sure that there is a way to optimize for that searcher in the first place, let alone actually gain something from them.

A fundamental principle of SEO is that all traffic is not created equal. Rather the goal of SEO is to attract targeted traffic to a website. If you sell sparkly pink tricycles for adults, you want to get the searcher who is looking for “sparkly pink tricycles for adults,” or some variant of that keyword phrase, to your site.

photo credit: Eyeshotpictures

Instant may or may not guess correctly when someone starts typing “spark…” into the search box. If Instant actually predicts correctly the searcher will happily click on those relevant results. If not she (or he) will just keep on typing until the results appear for what they are looking for, i.e. that cool pink trike.

And they may have to actually hit the “enter” key, which is something Google seems to think is a huge waste of time.

The upshot is that it is highly unlikely that the searcher will decide that what they really want is “sparknotes” or “spark plugs” and abandon the original search. Gotta get that trike, right?

Looking Ahead

Time will tell what impact Instant has on SEO, but I suspect it will be minimal. Of course I could be wrong. But I doubt it.

And since I like a bit of entertainment, and I am a Bob Dylan fan, I leave you with this video that Google put out there to illustrate Google Instant. Enjoy!

My only problem with this is they could have used the whole song, It’s a drag when it just stops!

Today Google unveiled Google Instant,  described as “search before you type,” which predicts what you are searching for and instantly shows results as you type.

Google claims that instant will make searching faster, as little as 2 to 3 seconds, smarter since Google’s predictions will help you even if you don’t quite know what it is you are searching for, and that the results will be instant since they show up as you type, there’s no need to hit the enter key.

Here is what happened when I typed in “gas gr.”

In the past Google has shown suggested search terms based on what you type, but the difference with Google Instant is that the search results of the first suggestion is displayed while you type.  It seems to me that most keyword research strategies don’t take into account these suggestions, and most keyword research tools  crunch the data from Google’s Keyword data which is based on actual queries.

Now that it isn’t even necessary to hit enter when a searching I want to know if Google will incorporate the suggested search terms into their keyword tool results. And it seems to me that from this point on any accurate keyword research will have to take the suggested keywords into account.

SEO’s across the web are debating whether this is a good or bad thing for SEO,

In case you missed it, here is Google’s video propaganda on the launch of Instant:

The internet revolution has forever changed the world, and your insurance business is no exception.  So you spend valuable time and money to develop a website.

Build it and they will come, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Today, domaintools.com shows that there are 122,410,433 domains registered,  with 77,938 new domains registered in the past 24 hours.

So how do you make your website stand out? More to the point, how do you make it easy for your prospective customers to find your site amongst the many?

The answer lies in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

This post is about SEO, I will discuss SEM later.

Wikipedia defines SEO as ‘the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.’

SEO can be divided into 2 areas: on-page and off page factors.

On-Page SEO Factors

The actual content on a web page is extremely important. On-page factors include, but are not limited to:

• Page Title
• Description
• Keywords
• Heading Tags
• Alt Image Tags
• Content

Although the on-page factors should be taken into consideration from the very beginning of website development, very often they are not, making it necessary to go back and make changes after the fact.

Off-Page SEO Factors

If you want your website to rank high in the search engines, and therefore attract free targeted traffic, the off-page factors are absolutely critical. Once your website is up and running this is where the work begins. Here are just a couple of things to consider to promote your website online, and make it look more authoritative to the search engines:

Link Building

Of primary importance is the number and quality of links pointing to your website form others. You can think of each link to your site as a vote of affirmation that your site is a valuable resource.

But it’s not enough to have more incoming links than your competitor. The actual text used in the link, called anchor text, should contain the keywords, or keyword phrases, that you want your site to rank highly for when someone does a search in a search engine. The anchor text shows the search engines that your site is relevant for that particular keyword.

It is also important to have links pointing to pages other than the home page.  This is called deep linking.

There are more than a few ways to build links.  A couple are mentioned below, and I’ll discuss more in later posts.

Article Directory Posting

Article directories provide not only a means to build links, but an opportunity to establish your expertise in your field.  All you need is a well written 500 or so word article, published on an established article directory, with a short bio and link back to your site.

Here is a list of prominent article directories.

Forums

Join relevant forums and become part of the discussion.  Put a link to your website in your signature and every time you post on the forum you will be adding a link to your site.

When getting involved with forums take the time to get to know the culture of that particular forum.  Don’t just charge in and post a lot, you can get yourself thrown off a forum that way. Become part of the discussion and strive to add value to the forum.

Blog Comments

Another way to increase your incoming link count is to make comments on others blog post.  Most blog comment forms have a field for your website, and uses the name you use as anchor text to link to it.  Use your name @ your keyword as your username.

The truth is that link building takes a lot of time and effort. But unless you have the budget for other types of advertisement it is an essential part of any successful website.

In the beginning the internet was a a high tech way for geeks to discuss geek stuff.  In just a few short years it has evolved into the all encompassing format for multimedia communication it is today. And it keeps on evolving.

Of course it’s old news that social media has forever changed the internet.  Aside from my wife, who vows to go to her grave without one, everyone I know has a Facebook page.  Recently even my 70 year old my mother friended me, and now I’m getting friend requests from her friends, which is a little disturbing. You’d understand if you knew my mother’s friends.

Today you can Digg your favorites, Stumbleupon a great article, find it on Technorati, keep yourself Linkedin, show your moves on YouTube, tweet about it to your hearts content, and it’s all quite Del.icio.us.

Forgive me for the last line, I couldn’t resist.

It goes without saying that everyone is doing it.  If you are not using social media to reach your customers you are missing the party.

But many business owners might think that their boring industry would not work on social media sites.  After all, how can you make something like soap, or insulation, or whatever boring product you offer interesting?

Well you’re not alone.  I just read this great post on on SEO.com.  Nathan Blair, the author, correctly points out what social marketing is really all about: emotion and branding.  You don’t want to offer up a bunch of dry facts about your product.  You want to have fun with it.

As an example, Nathan points to this fantastic YouTube campaign for body wash.

After watching those videos who cares what Old Spice smells like, you just gotta have it.  More importantly, you are very likely to share the video with someone.  You may even link to it from your Facebook page.  Your friends will “like” it, and they will share it with their friends, and before you know it everyone is talking about it, and…well, you get the idea.

Of course you probably don’t have the budget to produce something like this, but you really don’t need to.  What you do need to use social media for your business is creativity, a sense of fun, and when you approach social media you have to keep in mind the word social.

Social media is is about creating, growing and maintaining relationships.  It’s about building a personal network of  people who are interested in what you have to say, and equally important, joining and participating in other peoples networks, and listening to what they have to say.

Social media is not about hard selling.  It is about community. The sales comes once you have engaged the community, established yourself, and built trust.

So, is social media really something you can afford to ignore?

If you are in business today it goes without saying that you have a website.  Whether an international corporation or a local mom and pop shop, a website is a necessity in business today. The internet is a way for potential customers to find you, for you to find them,  and a way to keep in touch with the customers you already have.

But it’s not enough to have a static website or a storefront that never really changes.  The internet has become a conversation closer to real time than ever before.  People go to the internet looking for the latest, the freshest information they can find.  And Google, with 85% of the search market share, heavily favors websites that are constantly growing and evolving.

Google recently announced a major update to their indexing system called Caffeine, which updates in real time, offering the freshest, newest content available to the searcher.  This means that websites that are constantly updated will have the edge over sites that are less frequently updated.

So how does a business owner cope with this development? One of the best ways is with a blog.

Recently, in an interview with Entrepreneur.com, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s spam team, was interviewed regarding the changes that came with the Caffeine update.  Here’s what he said about blogs:

I would recommend that almost any business have a blog. Blogging is a great way to show people the human side of your company and provide information to customers and visitors. Blogging is also much lighter-weight than a press release. The only time I’d refrain from blogging is if you don’t anticipate updating your blog very often. If you only do a blog post every year or so, it makes your site look more like a ghost town than a vibrant community.

Of course many businesses have no idea how to make a blog site work for them. They are concerned about the time involved, and the writing. That’s where we come in.

At Mindstreams we have worked with a variety of companies to help them develop successful blogs that maintain and build customer relationships, and help keep them at the top of the search engines.

So my first task with Spinfield.com, is to explain exactly how to make a blog site work for your business.  Stay tuned.