Blog for Rankings

The latest release of Compendium Blogware that went live today included a big change that will benefit our content authors -- a new editing environment.

For the past year or so, we've been using the rich text editor supplied by the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library.  It's pretty powerful, but it had enough weaknesses to motivate us to look for a replacement.

Last fall we looked at a short list of potential candidates and decided that the best match for our needs was an open source editor created by a team of developers led by Frederico Caldeira Knabben.  The editor's name bears the initials of Mr. Knabben -- FCKeditor.

For the most part content authors should find the interface very similar.  Most of the styling features are still there, but some of the toolbar buttons have changed icons.  Our support team has prepared some introductory material to ease the transition for existing customers.

Some of the things that users will find as welcome additions:

• cleaner HTML created by the editor
• availability of Undo and Redo operations
• support for keyboard shortcuts, making the editor feel more like a word processor than an HTML form

Some of the things we have improved with respect to our own editor customizations:

• oversize images are re-sized on the server upon upload so that they fit within the typical width of a blog column, making page load times much faster
• a keyword strength meter that doesn't slow down the editor on older systems and browsers

One thing that may jar long some time users is the change in the keyword strength meter itself.  Although the red-to-green gradient remains, no longer does the editor sport a numerical score. 

It was our experience that some users became too fixated on the score getting "stuck" at a certain value.  The meter's algorithm was designed to balance the desire to include keywords against the need to ensure that they weren't used excessively in a post.  When you blog for SEO, you have to keep these opposing goals in mind, lest your content look spammy in the eyes of search engines.

Rather than shooting for a "perfect score", an author should treat the meter as  qualitative barometer of whether he or she is performing this balancing act well on a corporate blog.  Moving from a number to a qualitative measure should help emphasize that.

For those marketers  involved in search marketing, we know that search is the one bright spot in the marketing landscape.  As you can see from the eMarketer forecast, search will continue to accelerate against other online advertising…and of course we all know that traditional non-online advertising is in a long and protracted decline.

Why is search winning?  Because it is the only mass marketing tool in history where you are responding to a prospects intent.   No longer do we have to analyze data and hope that certain segments might be interested in our offer. 

With Search, our prospects simply tell us when they have a need or problem they could use our help with.  Condo, Austin?   Variable Printing Services?  Chrome 4 slice toaster?  New Tires, Buffalo?  All of these and millions more indicate the needs and desires of the searcher.   Do you sell tires in Buffalo?

80% of all web interactions begin with searches.

So why, in a recent Microsoft adCenter survey, did 73% of the small business owners say they would rather DO THEIR TAXES than start a paid search marketing campaign.   

It’s not a lack of desire or a lack of intelligence, what most web folks fail to recognize about small business marketing is that they are constrained by both time and money.   This is what  makes and internet business blog such a compelling option.   

With a business blogging solution designed for business, they get two things.  The first is a managed solution.  One of the beauties of SaaS is help.  Unlike “free” blogging tools where you are completely on your own,  hosted business blogging tools have actual people that work to make their clients successful.  

At the end of the day, all the business needs to do is tell stories…as Sienfield’s Kramer says…talk about your day.  The more they talk, the more search traffic they drive.   Easy to use blogging software makes search marketing a LOT easier than doing taxes…. Blog for SEO...and win.

 

1. Write compelling content.
2. Write it consistently.
3. Write it often.

Blogs started solely for SEO objectives will inevitably fail.

Bit by bit, posts look less and less like keyword optimized web pages and sink back to the familiar writing styles common to public relations and corporate marketing. Gone are the keywords that consumers are searching on. Gone is the traffic that used to come from search engines.

If SEO efforts persist, they can get sloppy without ongoing oversight either by an outsite SEO consultant or an internal blog champion (more about that in our next post). Keyword usage in blog posts can become disparate or worse, evolve into a keyword stuffing exercise.

Compendium's approach to corporate blogging helps you counteract this on several fronts.

1. Our product is multiuser blog software, which means that you can give your employees a stake in content creation through individual blogs.  Your most energetic employees can contribute, which keeps your content from falling into PR speak.
2. We recently introduced the ability for a customer to select a list of keywords to focus on.  This list appears prominently on the webpage where authors write their posts, making sure that they are aware of what topics your organization is trying to target. 
3. The author's content creation page has a list of links to recent news articles that are related to the focus keywords, which gives ample ideas for writing. As a matter of fact, I found Odden's article with the help of this suggestion feature.
4. Our Client Success team provides feedback to customers so that they have an idea of how their corporate blogging program is doing.  There are goals with measurable progress and advice on how to improve their corporate blogging strategy.
5. Our keyword strength meter algorithm throttles the score of a post that is excessively laden with keywords, which gently warns an author that his or her post might be too dense with keywords, thereby looking spammy.

"Blog about the customer's problem. Don't blog about your products; blog about something your customers care about. Rubbermaid blogs about getting organized, for example.  Emerson Process Experts blogs about factory automation.  If you can bring value to your customers around their problems, they'll remain interested in you. Blogging about your customers' problems makes it far more likely that bloggers in your space will link to your blog, which increases both traffic and search relevance."

"For B2B companies, get your employees in on the act. In companies that sell to other businesses, corporate communications typically sponsors the corporate blog.9 This is a mistake because product executives, product managers, and field marketing or sales support people better understand audience needs. When these staffers speak, B2B audiences recognize their expertise, trust their messages, and engage in the conversation. This is how dozens or hundreds of corporate-sanctioned bloggers at companies like HP, Microsoft, and Sun develop product connections with their particular customer groups."

• For every 1 click on a paid search result, the organic results generate 8.5 clicks (this is on a keyword parity basis, not counting those search results that have no paid ads)

• Based on action/conversion tracking, paid search clicks convert, on average, at 1.5X the rate of organic clicks (no surprise, since that ad text and landing page is custom optimized by the advertiser)

• From the numbers above, we can see that the opportunity from organic search is 5.66X that of paid search

1. The internet outperforms any other marketing channel out there.  A majority of business for companies comes through the web.  Additionally, the internet is one of the cheapest medians to use for marketing efforts and the ROI is like no other.  Where as print media used to be the way to reach your customers, it is no longer the case because it is so expensive and unresponsive.
2. Web budgets are being reassessed.  This means that as people pay more for Pay Per Click Campaigns you can acheive even better rankings through blogging.  Utlimately saving you and your company money.  In an earlier post of mine, I touched on the cost of PPC and how 95% of people click in the organic results.  Since that is where you want to be found, blogging is the affordable solution. 
3. You can measure your efforts through blogging.  By using an analytic tool you can determine which posts/pages are keeping your customers on the page and taking action.